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It may sound paradoxical for you, but smoking may actually benefit society by causing smokers to die younger, before they cost the health care system more:
Preventing obesity and smoking can save lives, but it does not save money, according to a new report.
It costs more to care for healthy people who live years longer, according to a Dutch study that counters the common perception that
preventing obesity would save governments millions of dollars."It was a small surprise," said Pieter van Baal, an economist at the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands, who led the study. "But it also makes sense. If you live longer, then you cost the health system more."
In a paper published online Monday in the Public Library of Science Medicine journal, Dutch researchers found that the health costs of thin and healthy people in adulthood are more expensive than those of either fat people or smokers.
You’d think that if your life depends on you taking your medicines that it would be incentive enough. But not for some patients, whose conditions are often made worse because they forget to take their meds.
When they get really sick and "boomerang" in and out of the hospital, these forgetful patients actually cost a lot of money. So, government, insurance companies, and doctors created a counterintuitive program to coax patients to take their meds: by paying them!
In a Philadelphia program people prescribed warfarin, an anti-blood-clot medication, can win $10 or $100 each day they take the drug — a kind of lottery using a computerized pillbox to record if they took the medicine and whether they won that day.
Before the program, Chiquita Parker, a 25-year-old single mother with lupus, too ill to continue her job with special needs children, repeatedly made medication mistakes, although she knows she depends on warfarin to prevent clots than can cause strokes, paralysis, or death.
“I would forget to take it,” and feel “like I couldn’t breathe,” she said. Or she would “take two in a day,” and develop bruises from uncontrolled internal bleeding.
But in the six-month lottery program, she pocketed about $300. “You got something for taking it,” Ms. Parker said. Suddenly, she said, “I was taking it regularly, I was doing so good.”
Needless to say, the program is controversial as some view it as rewarding bad behaviors:
Skeptics question if payments can be coercive or harm doctor-patient relationships. “Why should people who don’t want to take medication be paid, when prudent people who take medication are not?” said Dr. George Szmukler, a psychiatry professor at King’s College London.
What do you think? Does the end justify the means? Is it okay to bribe patients to do something they should’ve been doing in the first place?
With all the debate going on with health care, you’d be forgiven if you want to skip this post. But I think I’ve found the solution to making health care affordable for Americans: just outsource it to Thailand.
Eric Wahlgren of AOL’s Daily Finance has the story of medical tourism:
Like some 47 million other Americans, Nancy Sowa (pictured) doesn’t have health insurance. So when her doctors last year told her she needed a total hip replacement, the office manager for a non-profit did what a growing number of U.S. citizens are doing: She headed abroad. At Wockhardt Hospital in Bangalore, India, the 56-year-old was put up in a hospital "suite" far swankier than what she would typically find in the U.S., with a computer, fridge, cable TV, sitting area and an extra bed for her travel companion.
More to the point, the two-hour surgery in July, performed by an orthopedic surgeon trained in the U.S. and Australia, was a success. Four months later, the Durham, N.C. resident is feeling like her old self again, going for long hikes and planning her next vacation. The final tab for the procedure, including rehabilitative therapy and round-trip airfare for two? $12,000. That’s a fraction of the $45,000 to $90,000 she had been told the surgery would cost at home.
"I wouldn’t have been able to do the surgery in the United States," says Sowa. "I didn’t have to explore taking out a second mortgage or tapping family members because I had this other option."
