Several months ago, we asked our community, “What if some social problems may be easier to solve than to manage? And what if solving said problems violates our moral institutions and political institutions?”
The inquiry was inspired by Malcolm Gladwell’s feature in the New Yorker: “Million-Dollar Murray.” In it, Gladwell discussed power-law and the reasons why people fail to solve social problems. (Power-law distributions are those in which the majority of activity can be found at one extreme.)
“Million-Dollar Murray” told the story of Murray Barr, a chronically homeless former marine who racked up over one million dollars in hospital bills over a ten-year period. Homelessness has a power-law distribution: The majority of people are homeless for about a day, but quickly recover and move on with their lives. Ten percent of the homeless population, however, are episodic users and nearly consume public funds at the rate they swallow drugs and alcohol.
What Gladwell exposed is that it is much more cost-effective to solve social problems, rather than to simply treat them.
This reluctant truth made a bold appearance in this week’s New York Times.
“For the first time in history, lifestyle diseases like diabetes, heart disease, some cancers and others kill more people than communicable ones,” writes Mark Bittman, Opinionator columnist, about the fiscal toll of treating ‘lifestyle diseases.’ “Treating these diseases — and futile attempts to ‘cure’ them — costs a fortune, more than one-seventh of our GDP.
“But they’re preventable, and you prevent them the same way you cause them: lifestyle. A sane diet, along with exercise, meditation and intangibles like love prevent and even reverse disease. A sane diet alone would save us hundreds of billions of dollars and maybe more.”
Over the next twenty years, the costs of treating cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes combined will balloon to over one trillion dollars."
Bittman notes that the Federal budget will absorb its usual 60 percent of the cost, but relying on an increasingly thin federal budget is not a sustainable solution to our increasing hospital bills – and puffed up waistlines.
The beauty in battling this beast of burden is that there is a relatively simple solution to the budget and the bulk. You guessed it: eating better and living smarter. (For the record, eating a little bit less would do the trick as well.)
“The many numbers all point in the same direction," says Bittman. "Look at heart disease: The INTERHEART study of 30,000 men and women in 52 countries showed that at least 90 percent of heart disease is lifestyle related; a European study of more than 23,000 Germans showed that people with healthier lifestyles had an 81 percent lower risk. And those estimates might be on the low side.”
It will take an investment, not a Band-Aid “solution” to get us on the right track – a massive public health effort can save not only our health, but also our budget.
“Corny as it is to say so, if we can put a man on the moon we can create an environment in which an apple is a better and more accessible choice than a Pop-Tart. Some other billions of dollars must go to public health. Again: we built sewage systems; we built water supplies; we showed that we could get people to eat anything we marketed. Now all we have to do is build a food distribution system that favors real food, and market that.”
The fat catch is that the money is dictating we stick with the status quo. Erik D. Olson, director of the Kids’ Safe and Healthful Foods Project, declared that the time to fix school lunches is now … but that’s a hard sell to school districts, when schools typically spend less than a dollar a day on food for kids – most pay between 80 and 90 cents per lunch. And the uphill battle only gets more exhausting when cities like Chicago take matters into their own hands and ban home-packed lunches.
The vending machine cafeteria-lifestyle has to go. The liquor store on the corner should not be a community’s go-to for sustenance either. We can invest in real solutions, solutions that get to the very heart of the problem and slowly, but surely, change the system into a sustainable, affordable, preferable alternative. But will we?
Incentives, incentives, incentives.
What we need are business solutions to pressing social problems; we need innovative ideas for how to make good food and a better lifestyle both affordable and available. Otherwise, we'll keep nipping, tucking, and operating on the growing problem, while the cause remains untouched.
Even a slight change to the current structure could result in hundreds of billions in savings. But, like Bittman noted, we will need an alliance of insurers, government, individuals, and even Big Food, to push us in the right direction…
“This isn’t just fiscal responsibility, but social responsibility as well. And the alternative is not only fiscal catastrophe but millions of premature deaths.”
Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s lunch time and there’s a microwaveable meal calling my name.
Photo courtesy of voteprime (cc)
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