Healthcare bills continue to skyrocket, and Connecticut needs to help the middle class by lowering the cost of healthcare. No doubt you and your family continue to feel the pinch of escalating costs. I have introduced a proposal in the state legislature that I believe will lower healthcare costs significantly through greater prevention of diseases before they become life threatening—and expensive to treat.
Right now, America spends 16.5% of every dollar ($2.1 trillion) on healthcare, much of it paid by the middle class. Most of our national health care debate has focused on “who pays”—government, business, or individuals. But arguments over “who pays” will never really reduce costs, because they do not address the core problem. Whether as a taxpayer, consumer, or family, you will end up paying for healthcare unless we can reduce the actual cost of providing it.
Prevention is the key to attacking health care inflation. American health care is really a disease-care system. We do not focus on stopping disease before it starts, but rather treating it once it is really bad. Not only does this result in more lives lost to disease, but is extremely expensive. Over 95% of our healthcare dollars are spent on treating diseases after they have occurred.
Prevention can help reduce cost of treatment by up to 90% for many diseases, and improve survival rates significantly. Consider the top five diseases in our country, which make up 75% of all healthcare costs: heart disease, diabetes, prostrate cancer, breast cancer and obesity. Most of these diseases are easily detected and treated in their early stages, if the patients go for regular screenings. Others are more controllable in our lifestyle, whether diet or exercise. If Connecticut can figure out a way to either stop or catch early just 25% of these diseases, we will save $6 billion in our state.
I am again introducing legislation to give people financial incentives to get preventative screening. Under my Healthy Living Tax Credit proposal, all state residents who meet the American Medical Association guidelines for preventative screening and tests would be able to deduct their health care costs from their state income tax. For a family with $3,000 in healthcare costs, that is a $150 savings each year – in addition to the health benefits of stopping serious disease before it starts.
Receiving the Healthy Living Tax Credit would be relatively easy. You would have to get your annual physical, and 1-3 preventative tests depending on your age. For instance, men over 40 would need to get a prostate exam every five years and women over 40 a mammogram. No results of the tests would be shared with anyone, just a letter from your doctor saying you came in and had the tests done.
Through a simple tax credit, I believe we can give incentives for more families to come in for preventative medicine. Too many of us just go to the doctor when we are sick—and often the worst diseases go unnoticed until it is too late. While I have no illusion this will fix healthcare entirely, it will lower costs significantly for the middle class.
Lowering healthcare costs is also the key to covering the uninsured. The 6% of us who are uninsured in Connecticut tend to be working families and young people (the very poor are covered by Medicaid and other government programs). For the uninsured, programs like the Governor’s Charter Oak Plan that cost as little as $100/month for basic health care coverage are a good option. But imagine if we were able to take billions in costs out of healthcare through preventative medicine. We could lower the cost even further for the uninsured, and get more of them covered. I think this is a much better idea to help the uninsured than “universal health care”, where the government would take healthcare over and have the 94% of us that do have healthcare pay for the 6% who do not through higher taxes.
Transforming our healthcare system from disease-treatment into disease-prevention is the key to controlling costs for the middle class and covering the uninsured. I believe my Healthy Living Tax Credit is a strong first step in Connecticut towards that goal. Lowering healthcare costs through prevention is neither a Republican nor Democratic idea—it is just common sense. I hope we can work together in a bipartisan fashion to make it reality here in Connecticut.
Dan Debicella is the State Senator representing Stratford, Shelton, Monroe, and Seymour. If you have feedback for him or want to talk about the issues, he can be reached toll-free at (800) 842-1421 or by e-mail at dan.debicella@cga.ct.gov
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