Health reform bill to boost preventive medical care

The saying goes, “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Some IU professors want the country to focus more on the apple.

Congress provided about $15 billion for preventive health care in the health reform bill President Barack Obama signed Tuesday. On top of that, new insurance plans are required to pay for some preventive screenings.

Currently, about 2 percent to 5 percent of health care money is spent on preventing disease, estimated Mohammad Torabi, professor and chairman of the Department of Applied Health Science.

He said he’d like to see it around 20 percent.  

About 70 percent health care costs and mortalities are caused by a small number of preventable diseases, such as heart and lung disease, asthma and diabetes, said Lloyd Kolbe, associate dean for global and community health at the School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation.

In the debates, the public has ignored prevention, he said.

One aspect of preventing disease is providing health education and health promotion so people can protect themselves from getting sick.

These are programs that encourage people to be physically active, stop smoking and eat healthy.

Part of the bill requires restaurant chains to put nutrition information on food packages.
“What we’ve learned how to do is compress mortality,” Kolbe said. That is, make it so when people die, they die as healthy as possible.

The passage of the health bill was a great day in history, Torabi said. But he added there’s still more to do.

“There’s a lot to be done to make it more preventive friendly,” he said.
Prevention is fundamental

because it saves lives, prevents suffering, improves quality of life and saves tax payers, Torabi said.

Simple changes in local policies, such as making Bloomington tobacco free, made the city healthier than it otherwise would be, Kolbe said. He said area cardiologists have seen a difference.

Yet other changes haven’t been made.

“We don’t have the resources or the will to implement the types of programs to prevent obesity,” Kolbe said.

“Our prevention programs are enormously undeveloped,” Kolbe said. He said it’s not really expensive to implement the programs, but they do take political will.

In Europe, especially Finland, Kolbe said countries practice “health in all policies” by integrating policies to achieve better health outcomes.

They analyze all policies to see if they have an effect on health or not. That could
include transportation, energy and agriculture policies to see if they make health better or worse.

What the nation lacks, Kolbe said, is an understanding about what public health is.
He said students who aren’t public health majors don’t often have the opportunity to take courses that would allow them to understand public health. Yet he said IU offers several opportunities for students to learn about public health.

Kolbe said he’s proud the University has two programs for public health at IU-Bloomington and one at IU-Purdue University Indianapolis.