Total healthcare costs in the United States, more than 86% is due to chronic conditions.
In 2015, health care spending reached $3.2 trillion, accounting for 17.8% of GDP. This exceeded the combined federal expenditures for national defense, homeland security, education, and welfare.
By 2023, if we don’t change how we confront this challenge, annual healthcare costs in the U.S. will rise to over $4 trillion, the equivalent—in a single year—of four Iraq wars, making the cost of care using the current model economically unsustainable.
If our health outcomes were commensurate with such costs, we might decide they were worth it. Unfortunately, the U.S. spends twice the median per-capita costs of other industrialized countries, as calculated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), despite having relatively poor outcomes for such a massive investment.
Our current healthcare model fails to confront both the causes of and solutions for chronic disease and must be replaced with a model of comprehensive care geared to effectively treating and reversing this escalating crisis. This transformation requires something different than is usually available in our very expensive healthcare system.
A Contributing Factor—Outdated Clinical Model
Despite notable advances in treating and preventing infectious disease and trauma, the acute-care model that dominated 20th-century medicine has not been effective in treating and preventing chronic disease.
The primary driver of chronic disease is the interaction among genes, activities of daily living (lifestyle), and the environment.
Adopting a new operating system for 21st century medicine requires that we:
- Recognize and validate more appropriate and successful clinical modelsn
- Re-shape the education and clinical practices of health professionals to help them achieve proficiency in the assessment, treatment, and prevention of chronic diseasen
- Reimburse equitably for lifestyle medicine and expanded preventive strategies, acknowledging that the greatest health threats now arise from how we live, work, eat, play, and move
Yet the old model does not work because chronic disease is a food- and lifestyle driven, environment- and genetics- influenced phenomenon.
This problem can’t be solved by drugs and surgery, however helpful those tools may be in managing acute signs and symptoms. It can’t be solved be adding new or unconventional tools, such as botanical medicine and acupuncture, to a failing model.
It can’t be solved by pharmacogenomics (although advances in that discipline should help reduce deaths from inappropriately prescribed medication—estimated to be the fourth leading cause of hospital deaths) .
The costly riddle of chronic disease can only be solved by shifting our focus from suppression and management of symptoms to addressing their underlying causes.
Specifically, we must integrate what we know about how the human body works with individualized, patient-centered, science-based care that addresses the causes of complex, chronic disease, which are rooted in lifestyle choices, environmental exposures, and genetic influences.
This problem can’t be solved by drugs and surgery, however helpful those tools may be in managing acute signs and symptoms. It can’t be solved be adding new or unconventional tools, such as botanical medicine and acupuncture, to a failing model. It can’t be solved by pharmacogenomics (although advances in that discipline should help reduce deaths from inappropriately prescribed medication—estimated to be the fourth leading cause of hospital deaths) .
The costly riddle of chronic disease can only be solved by shifting our focus from suppression and management of symptoms to addressing their underlying causes. Specifically, we must integrate what we know about how the human body works with individualized, patient-centered, science-based care that addresses the causes of complex, chronic disease, which are rooted in lifestyle choices, environmental exposures, and genetic influences.
