Chronic disease is multi-faceted

Chronic diseases ARE multi-faceted, so the approach to treating them must be as well. Prevention is a huge part of this, and with that comes health education, promotion of healthier behaviors, policy change to reflect priority shifts, and research and development to know what course is best to take.

We've talked a lot about potential wide-spread health care reform in this country, and how all these little fixes don't actually amount to much change. The real problem as I see it is that each problem is treated as an individual problem, instead of being looked at in the context of a bigger issue. Health IT could be looked at in terms of chronic disease treatment. Health education could be looked at in terms of chronic disease treatment. Policy change could be looked at in terms of chronic disease treatment.... and on and on, you get my drift. Put all of these things together and you have one giant problem that is pleading with us to be fixed.

A huge problem is funding. Always funding. What if there was a shift in thinking to where it didn't matter how much we had to spend on health care to get the best case scenario - not we as in individuals, but we as in the government. After all, the proposed increase in SCHIP funding that President Bush so willingly vetoed TWICE was equal to just 16 days in Iraq -- and I can guarantee that not everybody is on the same page about those dollars. Just think, if we had unlimited dollars to spend on health care, we could do all the research we wanted, for the sake of discovering new things in science. We could provide everyone with the same, high quality of care. We could pay our physicians, yes even the primary care physicians, enough to where they wouldn't base their career choices on what specialty will pay off their medical school debt the fastest. We could educate the public to our heart's content about what is best for them, and how they can take responsibility for their health and their bodies, and not have to worry about cost. We could implement an interoperable, nationwide health IT system, with subsidies to get smaller practices and Medicare/Medicaid providers up and running. Scrap that, we could have universal coverage. The what-if's abound if we think about what we could do to better the health of our nation with unlimited funding and no ceiling on ideals. I truly believe chronic disease rates would go down with equity of care, prevention, treatment, education, dissemination of knowledge, and an overall shift in the way this country views health care.

Hopefully, something will change. Until then, I hope to someday be a doctor who can implement some of those ideals in any way possible.