(NEWS CENTER Maine)—
When it comes to health care costs, we’re number one. Woo-hoo! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!
Yup, we spend far more on health care than any other industrialized country, yet our outcomes aren’t much better. Yellow Light Breen is the president of the Maine Development Foundation, a non-partisan organization devoted to improving Maine’s long-term economic growth, and he cheerfully admits he’s a wonk who loves to immerse himself in the nerdy details of public policy. We talked to him about some of the challenges facing Maine, and since the high cost of healthcare sits atop that list, it’s no surprise that he’s got some ideas.
For starters, he acknowledges the obvious. Since health care is a national problem, there’s only so much Maine can do on its own. But that’s not to say we’re powerless, particularly when it comes to prevention. “We’ve tackled smoking in the past,” Breen points out. “We’ve tackled teen pregnancy in the past.” Those campaigns helped to reduce smoking and teen pregnancy, which are good outcomes by any standard.
One area that cries out for attention is Maine’s high rate of obesity, which lowers quality of life and drives health care costs higher. Whatever plan the state comes up with to address that problem, Breen says, won’t work unless it’s truly a long-term strategy, one that supporters stick with for years. “It can’t be a little bit here, a little bit there, work on it for a couple of years, forget about it, come back to it,” he says. “One commonality, whether it’s broadband [expansion] or workforce development or health care, you’ve got to have that long-range vision and then pound away at it because it’s an accumulation of those little things.”
Are the politicians listening? Are the voters? If they are, maybe in twenty or thirty years we’ll proudly say of our health care costs: we’re number three.