A very plausible way to cut health care costs by close to 50%, yet wind up with a healthier, happier, longer-lived population:
Asking the right questions about health care
http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2011/08/18/asking-the-right-questions-about-health-care/?hpt=hp_bn6
Of course, it requires people to do something more than take a pill, but the article argues that it is actually easier in the long run to get them to change their overall behavior than continue taking pills.
I completely reject the notion that lifestyle changes, even if successful, will lead to a reduction of health care expenses system-wide. For individual people, yes. But for the entire system? No way. The author has neglected the macroeconomic effects.
What I mean is that the medical and pharmaceutical establishments have created the means to dictate prices. If half of their patients are seeing them less often because their lifestyle changes have made them healthier, doctors will simply jack up fees on the others. If half of the sales of Lipitor dry up because many people are healthier and don’t need it any more, the drug maker will simply jack up the prices on Lipitor and all future drugs to ensure a continuation of the revenue curve. There is no way that I can see of reducing medical expenses without either dramatically reducing the number of employees in the medical profession or giving them a salary “haircut” or both, but you can’t do those things in a country playing lip service to free-market principles (let alone in an America where doctors wield political and economic clout).