THORPE: IN ORDER TO SLOW SPENDING, WE MUST SLOW RISE IN CHRONIC ILLNESS

While many politicians and pundits in Washington are squabbling over reforms to the insurance industry, one group is working to make sure that the topic of prevention plays an equal role in the health care debate.

The Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease (PFCD), a national and state-based coalition that seeks to educate the public on the number one cause of death, disability, and rising health care costs in the U.S., is leading the fight to create a conversion about chronic disease prevention as members of Congress consider sweeping health care reform legislation.

“Our idea has been to find a proven and effective program that works,” PFCD Executive Director Ken Thorpe said on a conference call Wednesday. “The idea would be to fund programs that work and get them out there and available for people to voluntarily engage if they want to and to find policy mechanisms to make them more widely available.”

Thorpe said that some of the group’s core principals were beginning to work their way into the bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives last week, as well as proposals in the U.S. Senate.

“There’s no doubt that we’ve made a big difference in framing the debate on the key drivers of health care spending — a third of the growth in health care spending is linked to the doubling of obesity and 75 percent of what we spend on health care is linked to chronically ill patients,” Thorpe said. “Clearly, if you’re going to make a difference on cost controls, you need a vehicle for those issues.”

Thorpe said the group is pushing for the creation of a Medicare program as well as care coordination. All total, said Thorpe, those measures would cost roughly $30 billion over the next 10 years, but would save at least $100 billion in insurance costs.

Thorpe said he thought the House bill did a “pretty good job” of addressing the groups concern’s, noting that the legislation contains a community-based prevention and wellness trust fund.

But Thorpe said the bill is lacking when it comes to “doing a better job of working with and managing people in the Medicare program that have multiple chronic health care conditions.”

Doing nothing, however, isn’t an option for PFCD.

“If we’re going to slow the growth in spending, we’ve got to do a better job of slowing the rise in chronic illness,” said Thorpe.

While PFCD supports passing some version of health care reform that includes measures aimed at curbing chronic disease, Thorpe said the group hasn’t taken a position on the House bill’s controversial “public option” plan.