To All:
Received the following report from a news service and thought it
was worth passing on as 'food for thought'. Perhaps some of the
ingredients can be used to form additional ammunition for
passage of the Udall bill in 1997.......Jack
01:35 PM ET 11/12/96
Study says 100 million Americans chronically ill
(Updates with quotes from Washington news conference)
By Joanne Kenen
WASHINGTON (Reuter) - Roughly 100 million Americans suffer
from chronic illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease or
arthritis, and the health care system is not designed to treat
their growing ranks and their rising costs, researchers said
Tuesday.
The chronically ill are not necessarily old, and millions
below age 65 are trying to be independent but need an array of
medical and social services.
``For the most part, the way health care is organized,
delivered and paid for in this country is based on an acute care
system that emphasizes 'curing' disease,'' Dr. Lewis Sandy of
the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation told a news conference.
But people with chronic disease need ``a broad scope of
social, community, and personal services as well as medical and
rehabilitative care that will help them live with their chronic
conditions, not 'cure' it or fix' it,'' he said.
The foundation funded the study, led by Catherine Hoffman of
the University of California, San Francisco. The report,
presented at the news conference, appears in this week's edition
of the Journal of the American Medical Society.
Chronically ill patients on average run up yearly medical
bills more than triple the costs of people without those
diseases -- $3,074 per person compared to $817. They count for
four out of five days spent in hospitals and 69 percent of
hospital admissions.
The yearly expenses, estimated at $659 billion in 1990 in
direct and indirect costs, will rise as the population ages and
more people develop chronic ailments, the study found.
``The sheer number of Americans with chronic conditions and
the health care costs they incur have reached a threshold
whereby both health care providers and policymakers are not only
facing health care financing issues, but they must (also) deal
with how to transform our health care delivery system so that it
better meets the needs of those living with chronic
conditions,'' Hoffman wrote.
At the news conference, some people with chronic illness in
their families told of their struggles with the health system,
or about some innovative community programs that have helped.
``I thought my background as a former long-term care planner
for the state of California would make it easier to navigate our
nation's disheveled, fragmented long-term care system,'' said
Devara Berger, whose husband Derek has a particularly
devastating form of Parkinson's disease.
``But I was wrong; there is no system to navigate,'' she
said. She later became involved with an interfaith network of
volunteer caregivers called Faith in Action.
Hoffman wrote that medical researchers have rarely studied
the cost and prevalence of chronic conditions and it was
surprising that a large number of sufferers were not old.
For the 88.5 million people with chronic ailments who are
not living in nursing homes or other institutions, 60 percent
are aged 18 to 64.
The figures arrive as the government is wrestling with how
to find money to rescue the Medicare trust fund, which covers
health care costs for the elderly and faces bankruptcy within
about five years. The growing cost of government-paid medical
care for the poor is also a budget issue and threatens
hospitals' finances as well.
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