Editorial October 12, 1987 Issue

Something to help with your health

Allison W. Phinney, Jr.

Scarcely a newspaper, magazine, or local television program today is without a page, column, or segment on health.

An article in the Los Angeles Times several months ago commented that the amount of money spent on health care in the United States had doubled in just a few years. It's now up to about $450 billion annually. But the writer observed, "Infinite medical needs have run into finite resources...."^{ Richard D. Lamm, "America's Inefficient Health Care: One Possible Cure Could Be Rationing," Los Angeles Times, February 1, 1987 .} The article also said, "There is little correlation between what a nation spends on health care and how healthy it is."

Other nations as well have learned this hard lesson that a national health system doesn't guarantee national health. The Utopian belief that someday there will be no disease because every needed remedy will have been discovered by science and implemented by technology seems somewhat frayed at the edges these days. New scourges replace old. New kinds of life style, stress-related diseases constantly appear. It becomes clearer that things are not quite as simple or as hopeful as they once might have seemed.

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