As the B.C. election campaign ramps up, let’s face up to the two biggest economic issue facing our province: soaring health-care costs – and their causes.
B.C.’s health-care spending is set to triple in the decade ending in 2016: from $6 billion in 2006 to a projected $17.4 billion in 2015-16. The growth in health-care spending alone will swallow up 40% more revenue than is projected from all the economic growth in the province over the next three years. It’s a monster.
What is most frustrating about this beast is we could put it on a crash diet without anyone getting hurt.
Why is health-care spending going up so fast? It’s mostly because of preventable chronic diseases. One out of three B.C. residents is suffering from chronic diseases that are consuming 80% of the health-care budget: think heart disease, strokes, lung disease and diabetes. People don’t catch these diseases, and most aren’t born with them. Mostly we invite them into our lives by the way we eat and live. As John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods says, “If you were a diabolical evil person and you decided you wanted to destroy the health of the U.S., you could not design a diet more suited to that task than what we actually have … with only 12% of our calories coming from whole plant foods.”
East Kootenay Medical Officer Dr. Andrew Larder told a B.C. government committee almost 10 years ago: “We could prevent up to 60% to 70% of all cancers … up to 90% of all heart disease, up to 60% of all strokes, up to 90% of all cases of chronic lung disease, up to 90% of all diabetes – all the things that are filling up our hospitals, and our doctors’ offices and our graveyards … [but] the entire focus of the general public, the current government and the health-care system as a whole is to pull drowning people out of the river [instead of] making sure people don’t fall into the river in the first place.”
At the urging of people like him, then-premier Gordon Campbell created one of the most impressive initiatives of his time in office: a partnership between the B.C. government and the BC Health Living Alliance (BCHLA) of non-profit organizations, under the ActNow banner, to go upstream and make B.C. the leader in North America in healthy living and physical fitness.
ActNow achieved its goal of getting smokers down to 14% of the population, but its success on physical activity, healthy eating and obesity reduction is harder to track. With the recent news from a UBC study that B.C. obesity rates jumped 25% in the last decade – with one out of four British Columbians now considered obese – it seems we’re still losing ground.
Stopping this slide should be the No. 1 economic priority for this province if it’s serious about debt reduction.
The BCHLA has a raft of recommendations on how to do that, including investments in active transportation and transit (hello Premier Clark!) tied to denser, transit-oriented communities where people can do more walking.
But its primary focus for the 2013 campaign is poverty reduction, because income levels are the biggest determinant of health. The BCHLA estimates that B.C. could save $1.2 billion a year in health-care costs just by improving the living conditions of the poorest 20%.
For the other 80%, this is ultimately about individual responsibility, and some recent business trends show people are stepping up: healthy fast-food restaurants are taking off, organic food sales are up, restaurants are piling on to B.C.’s Informed Dining nutritional information project.
Businesses should be prepared for the next step that may well be necessary to stop the health-care spending hemorrhage: taxes on sugary drinks and restrictions on sodium levels in food.
Either we’re serious about saving health-care costs or we’re not. •
