A Battle Worth Fighting

Teri Mills is a longtime Democracy For America community member. Her guest column on health care appears on Blog for America on Fridays and she blogs at www.nationalnurse.org.

The New York Times ran a four part series last week on Type 2 diabetes that apparently caught the attention of a good many readers. By the time this column is published it may be on its way to the archives, but you can catch some quotes at www.nationalnurse.org and here are a few more that should raise your own red or blue flag. Even discovery of a gene won't immediately help the 40 percent of the population who are found to have a predisposition for developing the disease.

"An estimated 800,000 adult New Yorkers—more than one in every eight—now have diabetes, and city health officials describe the problem as a bona fide epidemic.

"The percentage of persons with diabetes New York City is nearly a third higher than in the nation. New cases have been cropping up close to twice as fast as cases nationally. And of adults believed to have the illness, health officials estimate, nearly one-third do not know it."

One in three children born in the United States five years ago are expected to have diabetes in their lifetimes, according to a projection by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The forecast is even bleaker for Latinos: one in every two."

The Times articles point out the high cost of treating Type 2 diabetes, a disease that is preventable and can be postponed. These included the expense and hardship of caring for family members, higher taxes, increased public spending to divert the disease, but add on to that time lost from work, and higher insurance premiums and you can see how this condition will affect all of our pocketbooks.

A Times reporter went on to say, "Health economists suggest that if these preventive measures were practiced on a wide scale, complications from diabetes would be largely eliminated and the American medical system, and by extension taxpayers, could save as much as $30 billion over 10 years. The experts disagree on what such an effort would cost. (How much nutrition counseling does it take to wean the average person from French fries?) Nonetheless, many of them believe the cost would be largely offset by the savings."

Rapid Response, Howard Dean, and Jim Dean have taught us never to be silent, so here is one letter that was submitted but not published:

N.R. Kleinfield quotes the commissioner of the NY City Department of Health: "Getting millions of people to change their behaviors (to prevent Type 2 diabetes) will require some kind of national crusade." Nurses around the country could not agree more and are prepared to help lead the fight. As the most trusted of health professionals, nurses could be part of the solution of reducing health care costs and keeping families healthy. Providing preventive health care information to every American could be done through the proposed Office of the National Nurse. The National Nurse would address the nation on specific ways to prevent diabetes, followed by nationwide health education days led by volunteer nurses that the public would be encouraged to attend. The United States has a long-standing history of finding solutions to our problems. The National Nurse should be one of them.

Teri Mills, RN, MS, ANP
Democracy for Oregon

Alternate link for comments