Health Care – Food for Thought With one week to go in this year’s legislative session, the General Assembly has yet to come to agreement on increasing tobacco taxes. This should be a no brainer. It is pretty simple: smoking can make you sick and treatments are costly. Making it more expensive to smoke is one way of deterring smoking – and improving health. Banning smoking in restaurants is another. It’s a form of prevention that works. Get on with it.

Using revenue from an increased tobacco tax to pay for health insurance coverage for the working poor makes sense to as too many working people still can’t afford insurance.

At some point however, this particular solution will face its own structural deficit. Health care costs continue to rise, and if price is a deterrent, the revenue source from tobacco taxes will decline.

Polls show that a majority of Americans want universal health care and that government should provide it. Yet, no one has solved the problem how to pay for it and the costs that keep going up. Keeping Americans healthy is devouring more and more of our gross domestic product (GDP)– we already spend much more on health care as a percentage of GDP than Germany, France and Switzerland - and to have universal health coverage like those countries do will likely require even more spending, and higher taxes.

In fact, we are less healthy than our European cousins, but not necessarily because they have universal coverage and we don’t. Obesity and diabetes have been described as reaching epidemic proportions in the U.S. The pharmaceutical industry keeps pumping out new medications to control and treat these diseases, but the main problem resides in the food we eat and our lifestyle choices.

If people expect government to do more in providing health care coverage for everyone, then we ought to expect government to do more to insure that what we are eating is healthy. Several cities across the country are taking initiatives to create food policy councils to determine food policy. New York has its own food czar to coordinate that city’s food policy, but no major urban city has taken the lead on making food an essential part of their efforts to improve the health of its citizens, especially the poor who suffer most from bad nutrition.

Better access to health care is but one answer to the health care crisis that we face. A better and less costly solution is to improve what we eat. Providing healthier foods to children in schools and to our seniors in meals on wheels programs and senior centers, teaching better eating habits, banning transfats in restaurants, and using vacant land in Baltimore City to create urban farms are some of the other things that government can do to help people to become healthier.

Labels: General Assembly, Healthcare, Maryland

  10:23 AM •