Health Care Cost Reduction

Today, I received another Green Party Release on Single Payer Health Care. I think that there is a great deal of benefit in the Single Payer Health Care system but those benefits are mostly from the fact that it is the only way to ensure adequate coverage for the entire population. It will, in itself, do very little to reduce the cost of health care in America.

In order to reduce health care costs, we need to improve the health of our population and that is not going to be easy. I will look at a few additional things if you click Read more!.


To begin with, it is necessary to pay attention to the links between health care costs and environmental action / non-action. A recent article by Sarah Boseley, Health Editor from The Guardian (UK) warns us that "Climate change biggest threat to health".

Rising global temperatures would have a catastrophic effect on human health, the doctors said, and patterns of infection would change, with insect-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever spreading more easily.

Heatwaves such as occurred in Europe in 2003, which caused up to 70,000 "excess" deaths, will become more common, as will hurricanes, cyclones and storms, causing flooding and injuries.

I don't think that America is ready for malaria to become a disease we need to be concerned about. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is, thankfully, pouring significant money into the research needed to end epidemic malaria. I hope that they do the job for all the world.

This is really old news. I mentioned in early 2008 that Stanford University has released a study on the Health Consequences of Global Warming. That same page called attention to the $3 Billion / yr cost of Air Pollution in the San Joaquin Valley and the direct effect it has on young children.

If we are going to make radical changes in the cost of health care, it means that we have to make radical changes in our attitude about ecological issues.

In a similar manner, we need to make changes in life style to reduce the amount of obesity that is prevalent in modern society. The rising rates of diabetes, a long term chronic illness, is a significant component of our rising health care costs.

This Highlight summarizes findings from AHRQ's Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) using hospital care data to examine how diabetes-related complications affect health status, hospitalizations, and economic costs. For example:

* Cardiovascular disease and lower extremity amputations are significantly more likely to occur in patients with diabetes than those without the condition.
* Multiple hospitalizations are common among individuals with diabetes and certain vulnerable populations are more likely to experience multiple hospital stays.
* The complications associated with diabetes result in significant costs to the health care system, particularly for public insurance programs, and are largely preventable.
(US Dept. of Health and Human Services)

We still seem to complain about the costs but are unwilling to adapt our own lives. We must begin to view the problems of health care as ecological as well as administrative. We need both sets of solutions.

We are all in this together

I am one of those Greens who believes that everything positive emanates from an ecological view of the universe. In simple terms, we can not achieve economic justice, social justice, world peace or any other positive goal unless we begin with the understanding that everything is connected in so many ways that to diminish one is to diminish all.

In some recent reading, I find that I am in good company. Click Read more! for a few well chosen examples.


Czeslaw Milosz won a Nobel Prize in Literature. The fist of his book that I read was The Captive Mind. Like Akshay Ahuja's personal commentary on this, I pick and choose. What I choose is maybe a minor point for Milosz.

Once he science of nature taught that a forest was a collective of trees governed by a few elementary laws. It seemed that if one cut out the forest and replanted it, after a definite period of years a new forest, exactly like the old, would appear. Today we know this is not so; a forest is an organism arising out of complicated interactions of mosses, soil, fungi, trees and grasses. The moment these mosses and fungi are destroyed by the cutting out of the forest, the symbiotic pattern is disturbed and the new forest is a completely different organism from what we might be expected by someone who ignored the sociology of plants.

This, from a book published in 1953. Milosz's intent was to criticize the stultifying effects of Stalinist Communism on the intelligentsia of Europe Europe. However, the view of what was considered to be "known" at that time has still not become a matter of political policy; not in the new states of Eastern Europe and surely not in the United States of the 21st Century.

The clearest, most recent commentary on our current situation came from Paul Nurse, Michael Novacek and Edward O. Wilson on the Charlie Rose Show Monday Night, Dec. 8, 2008. Novacek, Sr. Vice-president of the American Museum of Natural History states the situation clearly.

So, one of the keys there is to say that these problems on the environment are not really separate from many of these others, that there is a huge relationship, as Paul just explained, between biodiversity and the sustainability of ecosystems and biodiversity and our economic potentials, and our potentials in health, which is very high on the radar screen in terms of the problem.

Rose brought forward another aspect of the problem that faces us all.

One of the things I worry about with the economic crisis is that because it is so severe and so urgent and so pervasive, it’s pushing lots of things off the table right now.

I think all of these big named scientists missed the opportunity to state what is so obvious, at least to me. We need to change the manner in which we evaluate potential solutions to our problems. If we solve the economic problems today by killing off a few million species, then we are all made less than we should be. It is not so much the choice of goals but the methods we use to reach those goals that needs to change.

It appears that not much of what Milosz said that we knew in 1953 has really been connected to what we do, even after 55 years and several generations.

What did I mean by that...

In a post to the Green California Forum email list, my fellow blogger, Orval Osborne asked me to elaborate on a viewpoint that I had voiced in a previous post to that list. What I had actually said was...

If I were able to control the agenda for GIWG, [GP California Green Issues Working Group] I would do the following:

• take a limited set of issues... probably only 2... Global Warming and Water.
• I would begin to prepare position statements, focused on California, even more focused on community activism, and I would target them toward candidates: what should I say we should be doing locally, state-wide about this issue?. I would then target them toward press releases, actions and/or tabling material and event illustrating that the Green Party is the one telling the truth and showing how this will be good for the community... not just the sacrifice of a penitent.

I agree that this needs further explanation.

There are interesting parallels between the narrative of the state of modern man that is the basis of most environmental rhetoric and the biblical story of the Garden of Eden. The environmental rhetoric is that the world would be great is man stopped doing all of those awful things to it. We could then return to a state of harmony. In the religious narrative, the fall from grace was due to the knowledge of good and evil. In the environmental narrative the fall from grace is due to the pollution we push out into the world in the pursuit of economic advantage and a modern lifestyle.

I have problems with both in that they place man outside of nature. Until modern times, man's goal was to control nature and put it to work in the service of his needs. We are beginning to understand that the world does not work that way, but not many have yet put that understanding to work in the realm of politics. It is too frightening to think about because it mean that you have to rethink historical perceptions and that is never easy nor comfortable.

My transition from a conservative Republican dedicated to Conservation to a Green came from my own development of a viewpoint that I would best describe a that of deep ecology. In this, it was not the philosophy of Arne Naess nor the activism of Judi Bari that changed my thinking but rather the science of Frijtof Capra and the reading of his book The Web of Life. If you are a Green and have not read Capra, you should. He was also co-author (with Charlene Spretnak) of the 1984 book Green Politics.

I have, for a long time, been frustrated by some aspects of the environmental movement, in particular those whose thinking does not go beyond "stop" or "limit" to provide the alternatives. In too many cases, that becomes a task that we are all too willing to leave for someone else to do.

• When you stop logging the Humboldt County redwoods, how do you build a new, local economy? It would have been more effective to work on providing the alternative from the beginning, in other words community based sustainable economics.
• If you stop snowmobiles in Yellowstone, what do you do to replace that mode of tourist transportation during the winter months? Again it is a local economic issue. For a long time, there was no answer. At least, this year, the Sierra Club will have one winter trip to Yellowstone. Capacity 9.

Rather than viewing ourselves as outside of nature, we must think of ourselves as an integral part of the web of life. Instead of asking how we might return to whatever Eden we think existed in the past, we need to begin asking What kind of world might we create? Instead of asking Who am I? should we not ask Who am I becoming?

There are two fundamental concepts that are behind the Green Movement: an understanding of the truth of deep ecology and a strong sense of social justice. They should inform and guide all that we do. When we lose either we are no longer green.