by Nick Jacobs

The topic of controlling health care costs has been the center of attention at the last three conferences at which I have been either a speaker or an attendee: Consumer Health World Conference in Las Vegas, World Healthcare Congress in Washington D.C. and the Health Forum Integrative Medicine Conference in San Diego. The general consensus has been that we need an overhaul, but what makes up a viable retooling that will be acceptable to all?

At the World Health Conference we heard that preventative medicine is one of the major cures applicable to our health system. If we could continue to make strides in the promotion and societal acceptance of exercise, smoking cessation, decreased consumption of saturated fats and complete deletion of Trans fats, we would see exponential changes in our overall health status as we reduce diabetes, obesity, heart disease and cancers.

Of course, the logical conclusion at the Forum was to make an entire menu of complementary and alternative medicine solutions available to everyone, a.k.a., bring to the mainstream those healing cures, traditions, and treatments that indigenous man has embraced for thousands of years. Consequently, those incurable maladies that typically have required surgery after surgery with no curative results will be addressed by embracing a holistic care to treat the root causes. Be it spirituality, stress management techniques, energy treatments or music therapy; there are sometimes cures in nontraditional complementary and alternative medicines that could never be uncovered with antibiotics, surgery or any other version of the presently accepted healing modalities that feed our current $2+ trillion dollar health system.

We have also explored the possibility of keeping our elderly citizens at home as long as possible. This can be achieved through the use of high-tech equipment intended to monitor and to help remind them to take their medicines. According to some experts, if only a quarter of the current nursing home residents could remain in their homes this would result in a savings of more than $12 billion a year.

Like it or not, retail medical clinics or basic health care centers in commercial outlets that can take care of problems that are expensively addressed in our overcrowded emergency rooms are seen as extremely viable alternatives to the high cost care currently being administered in our hospitals.

Another huge initiative will be the unification of medical records using the Internet. Every patient would then carry a USB drive containing his or her medical records. These records could be downloaded by any doctor anywhere, or better still, the individualized Patient Identification Number with a personal Pin would make those updated records available on line.

Several other major suggestions that were put forth during these conferences included the implementation of a Market-based Universal health system, financial assistance for low income individuals, and equal tax treatment.

The bottom line, however, is that we, as an industry will be consistently challenged to become more transparent in our charges, quality indicators, physician performance report cards, accreditation ratings, and more as our country searches for a way to care for the nearly 50 M uninsured, and the aging Baby Boomers