Big Ag ‘vs’ Big Insurance and healthcare

Michael Pollan has some good thoughts on how lowering healthcare costs will ultimately involve changing America’s eating habits, and therefore changing how Washington subsidizes Big Ag.

Here’s the nut graf:

We’re spending $147 billion to treat obesity, $116 billion to treat diabetes, and hundreds of billions more to treat cardiovascular disease and the many types of cancer that have been linked to the so-called Western diet. One recent study estimated that 30 percent of the increase in health care spending over the past 20 years could be attributed to the soaring rate of obesity, a condition that now accounts for nearly a tenth of all spending on health care.

If we can cut one-third of that cost through dietary changes and farm subsidy cuts and/or changes, we’ve paid for the nominal costs of national healthcare right there.

But that’s only a starter:

To put it more bluntly, the government is putting itself in the uncomfortable position of subsidizing both the costs of treating Type 2 diabetes and the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup. … Why the disconnect? Probably because reforming the food system is politically even more difficult than reforming the health care system. … Cheap food is going to be popular as long as the social and environmental costs of that food are charged to the future. There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. … As things stand, the health care industry finds it more profitable to treat chronic diseases than to prevent them.

What about insurers? Well, they don’t get off lightly, either:

As for the insurers, you would think preventing chronic diseases would be good business, but, at least under the current rules, it’s much better business simply to keep patients at risk for chronic disease out of your pool of customers, whether through lifetime caps on coverage or rules against pre-existing conditions or by figuring out ways to toss patients overboard when they become ill.

That’s all just from the first webpage of Pollan’s column. Read the full thing. Pollan is hopeful this will change, but I think he underestimates the power of the Senate Agriculture Committee and ADM.
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