Why the U.S. Healthcare Law Misses the Point

The coming decision by the Supreme Court on the Affordable Care Act likely won't make much difference to the future of America, regardless of how the justices rule. That's because, no matter what they decide, the whole healthcare law itself doesn't address the nation's real health problems.

This is not a partisan position. Let me explain.

At $2.5 trillion annually, healthcare costs are America's single biggest national expense, by far. Nothing even comes close, not the war in Afghanistan, not the Wall Street bailouts, or various entitlements. America's healthcare bill is three times the size of the nation's defense bill and the same size as the entire economy of Russia and India added together. The size of America's healthcare bill is staggering and much larger than anyone knows.

We spend an average of $8,000 per person while countries like England, Canada, and Germany spend an average of just $4,000 per citizen. And their citizens live longer than we do.

It gets worse. At the current annual 6% growth rate of healthcare costs, our total healthcare bill will go from $2.5 trillion to almost exactly $4.5 trillion in 10 years. If you add the stubs of the increases over the 10-year period, above the running $2.5 trillion our debt-burdened nation already lacks, we'll see $10 trillion in surprise new tax costs. To put this in perspective, our coming healthcare costs are three times the size of the subprime meltdown that brought America and the world to our knees. We may have survived the subprime mess, but health costs will honestly break the republic.

Here's what blows me away: Our government reports that 70% of all these costs are for preventable diseases. Bluntly, we're eating ourselves to sickness and death and seeing epidemic rates of diabetes, according to government studies. The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index finds that two-thirds of Americans are either overweight or obese. And we're all paying about $1 trillion per year to respond to these problems rather than prevent them.

In the middle of this deadly crisis, the whole healthcare debate is focused on exactly the wrong things: on how to pay for insurance and now also on the constitutionality of a law, rather than how to prevent killers like obesity and diabetes in the first place.

I know it sounds too simple, but eating and obesity are the nation's biggest health problems, not "Who pays for insurance?" and "How does all of this relate to the Commerce Clause?"

If our elected officials, from both parties, attacked the cause rather than the effects, they could save America. If they understood what Gallup knows -- that a focus on wellbeing will put any nation on a path to economic prosperity -- they could improve not just America's health, but everything from jobs to the GDP. But I'm afraid we're going to continue debating irrelevancies like how nine justices will rule…which is just shifting deck chairs on an undeniably sinking ship.