Is More Health Insurance the Answer?
The Rand Corporation created a very interesting pie chart, quantifying the influences of factors responsible for premature death in the US.
A mere 10% of all premature deaths in the US can be attributed to being unable to access medical care. The other 90% is split nearly evenly between behavioral, social-environmental and genetic factors, of which 60%, the non-genetic drivers, can be modified. Yet instead of investing the bulk of our resources in this big bucket of behavioral-environmental-social modification, we put 97% of all healthcare dollars towards medical interventions. This investment can at best produce marginal improvements in premature deaths, since the biggest causes of the effect in question are being all but ignored.
This is taken from two posts (here and here) by Marya Zilberberg.
The premise that more insurance will prevent premature death seems flawed. Insurance protects my assets against the risk of getting sick.
So how much of this do I have control over? Approximately 50%? I don’t like these odds.
Interesting perspective.
I have always heard that the rule of thumb was that two-thirds of health problems were related to lifestyle factors. This graphic put the total at about 55%. Although it’s not quite two-thirds, the total that can be controlled by the individual exceeds half. Moreover, the piece of the pie “medical shortfalls” would be less likely to come into play if people improved their lifestyle behaviors.