Improving my Health--Different Solutions for Different Problems

Paul Krugman (whom I was fortunate to study under) wrote in his newsletter today (subscribe here) that after before 1980 in the US, recessions were caused by external events (interest rate hikes to control inflation) while after 1980 they have been caused by private sector excesses--too much debt, too much investment etc.

And therefore, the post-recession recoveries have been different--earlier, the economy bounced back quickly once interest rates fell, now it takes much longer to recover—the “jobless recovery.” And due to different causes, we need different approaches to dealing with recessions now, compared with earlier.

 This sounds like healthcare. You can be unwell due to three reasons:

(1) A physical accident--hit by a car, a fall etc.

(2) External pathogens--a bacteria or virus from mosquitos, dirty water, air-borne virus etc, and

(3) An internal malfunction--where our body’s normal activities and functioning gradually break down, like in diabetes, auto-immune disease, cardiac functions or cancer--now by-far the leading causes of poor health and death. 

And just as different recessions need different solutions, each of the above health situations need different solutions.  

• Trauma care, surgery and medicines for the first.  
• Better health to build immunity against the second, with medicines and vaccines only for when our natural immunity is not enough. 
• And changes in diet, stress levels, emotional behaviour, or "lifestyle changes," for the third. 

Yet, the healthcare business basically uses the same fundamental approach—chemicals and medicines--for all the three, because that is known, comfortable and profitable. But this is only suppressing health problems and creating dependency on increasingly expensive and increasingly toxic medicines and procedures.  

We need to eliminate the causes of poor health, not just try to patch people us after they fall ill. We need “health-care,” not just “illness-care”—which is what we have today. This means strengthening the body with good food, clean air and water, exercise, meditation and stress reduction, changing social norms that create stress and jobs that are bad for health, etc—so our body can take care of itself.  

The world and policies don't need to change, to a large extent we can take our health into our own hands. Health insurance companies must aggressively focus on rewarding people for such behaviors. Doctors and health advisors should help people manage their habits to improve health. People also need better information on how their daily habits, what they eat and breathe, and how they think and behave, undermine their health and well-being. Hospitals and doctors should be left mainly to take care of (#1) and those cases of (#2) where the immunity was not enough to fight off the external pathogen.  

In addition, industries that cause poor health—including agriculture, processed food, junk food brands, polluting industries etc, must be held to higher responsibility by consumers, regulators, policy-makers and investors (private equity or public markets).

A “50%” healthcare sector could be better for all of us because we can eliminate the causes of poor health, not just fix the broken body. That should be the goal. It will be bad for some people's businesses, but good for the rest of us. What are we going to do?