Incentives Rather Than Coverage May Be More Important in Health Care Reform

Click on the title to read an article that suggests that promoting incentives to stay healthy may be more important to health care reform than providing insurance coverage. I agree, but the true key is far more fundamental than that. You can provide all the incentives you want but until people accept personal responsibility for their health you will only get so far. As the old proverb says, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink! I hear a lot of people demanding coverage for illness but I don't hear anyone talking about what they would be willing to do to stay healthy, such as stop smoking, lose weight, control their blood pressure or control their diabetes. They want coverage whether or not they are willing to do these things for themselves. The bottom line is that individual responsibility for personal health is the only way to true reform and cost control. Providing incentives will help us get there but they are not the panacea. So the real question in health care reform is once you get the horse to water how do you get him to drink?