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Macon Telegraph - Opinion Editorial
True health reform begins right here
By Greg Dent
10/04/09
health-care reform and may pass some form of legislation by the end of the year. Even if it works perfectly and does exactly what its sponsors hope and predict, it will fall far short of solving all of our health-care challenges.
At the end of the day, real progress in improving our health status and lowering our health-care costs will fall to us at the individual and community level.
For the past decade, Community Health Works, a nonprofit corporation, has been working to improve the health status of the nearly 400,000 Georgians who reside in seven Central Georgia counties — Bibb, Crawford, Houston, Jones, Monroe, Peach and Twiggs.
Last year we took a major step forward with the completion and publication of a report entitled “Healthy Living in Middle Georgia: A Community Needs Analysis.” That report, funded with a grant from state’s Office of Rural Health, constitutes the first comprehensive effort to document the health status of Central Georgians and the barriers they face to living healthier lives.
Next week, we take another major step forward and will hopefully build on the work that went into the “Healthy Living” report. Wednesday morning, an estimated 50-to-75 business, government and health-care leaders will gather for a leadership breakfast to kick off work on a plan to tackle just one of the major health problems afflicting our region: Obesity.
Later in the month, a larger group will gather for the first Central Georgia Regional Health Summit with a goal of putting together a workable plan to mount an attack on this problem.
The truth is we had our share of widespread health problems to focus on, including smoking, drug and alcohol abuse and mental illness, among many others. But obesity was the biggest — and the one that holds the greatest prospect for both improving individual health status and reducing health-care costs.
It’s easy to dismiss someone else’s challenge with weight control as a personal problem — and it most certainly is that. But it has become so pervasive that it rises, in our view, to the level of a community challenge, and one we should take on together.
The sad truth is that adults in the seven counties served by Community Health Works smoke more, exercise less and are more obese than their counterparts in other parts of the state and the nation. According to state research conducted from 2004 through 2006, fully 31.1 percent of Middle Georgia adults were obese, versus 26.5 percent of all Georgia adults. It’s hard to imagine those numbers have improved in the last couple of years.
Obese adults are far more likely to suffer from heart disease, hypertension, high cholesterol, diabetes and some forms of cancer than non-obese adults, and those conditions, of course, come with huge human and economic price tags. The human costs are easy enough to see, including limited productivity, shortened life spans and diminished quality of life.
The economic costs also are obvious, if difficult to quantify. In recent years, however, various studies have begun to do exactly that — and the price tag is enormous. In 2005, the journal Health Affairs reported that employers and privately insured families spent $36.5 billion on obesity-linked illnesses in 2002 — up 10-fold from an inflation-adjusted $3.6 billion just five years earlier.
Those numbers have continued to swell. In a recent article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Dr. Kenneth Thorpe, chairman of Department of Health Policy and Management at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, pegged reducing obesity as a critical factor in controlling our health-care costs.
He reported that obesity is estimated to be responsible for nearly a third of the rise in inflation-adjusted health-care spending between 1987 and 2006, or about $220 billion.
“If we 
cut excess from consumer behavior due to conditions related to obesity and overweight,” Dr. Thorpe added, “we could save that amount per year.”
Let’s think about that and do the local math. Working with 2008 U.S. Census Bureau estimates, Central Georgia’s 390,674 residents represented just over one-tenth of one percent of the total U.S. population of 304 million. Apply that figure — .1285 percent, to be exact — to $220 billion and you come up with $282.7 million in potential annual health expenditure savings in our little seven-county region of Georgia.
Where I come from, $282.7 million is still real money.
Of course, we don’t have a magic wand that we can use to eliminate obesity all at once. But even if we manage to shave just one measly percentage point a year off the current total, that would yield about $9 million a year in reduced health-care spending. Over time, it adds up.
Take it down another level and think about it from your own perspective — whatever that is. If you own or manage a business, take a look around and think about how much money you could save (and how much healthier and more productive your employees would be) if you could reduce and ultimately eliminate obesity in your workplace. If you’re a local government leader, think about how much you might be able to trim your annual indigent care payments to local health-care providers by making a significant dent in local obesity.
If you’re a local hospital administrator, ask your financial staff to figure out how much of your uncompensated care costs are associated with obesity. And if you’re one of the 100,000-plus residents of Middle Georgia who could stand to lose a little or a lot, think about just how much happier and healthier — and maybe even wealthier — you could be by losing that extra weight.
These are all goals worth working toward. This week, I’m confident Middle Georgia will take important first steps toward reaching them. We’ve all got a lot to gain. Or lose.
Greg Dent is president and CEO of Community Health Works. For more information about the Central Georgia Regional Health Summit, go to www.cgrhs.org