Reply #32: How do you feel about "Executive Fitness" healthcare? (Clark)

[RandomUser]

In the military, Clark says that they have so-called "Executive Fitness" programs. What that means is that people age 40 to 60 are required to have regular comprehenisve medical examinations and reviews every 5 yrs. And people over the age of 60 are required to do these comprehensive medical exams every year. The key is prevention, reasoning that it's cheaper to prevent cancer or diseases and catch them in their early stages rather than to treat them once they've developed.

Clark wants to take this concept of "executive fitness" from the military and modify it by adding personal history tailoring. Thus, if you have a family history of diabetes or cardiovascular disease, you would be subjected to these regular medical exams and preventative healthcare, along with people in certain age groups. Preventing disease cuts down the cost and saves lives, rather than the expensive treatments after a fullblown disease manifestation. So he wants to increase funding for preventive medicine.

Also, he doesn't believe that we should reduce services, but he acknowledges that healthcare costs are rising at astronomical rates, so he wants to reduce healthcare costs by doing two things:
1) systems analysis
2) information technology

He wants to apply systems analysis to the healthcare industry. Every other business institution conducts systems analysis to identify flaws and ways to modify, improve effectiveness, and cut waste. He believes that it's time healthcare did the same thing.

He wants to use information technology to cut costs in datamanagement and automate things like prescription drugs, in order to reduce overhead. In Kosovo, he used hi-tech computer mapping to convince Milosovic to agree to a border boundary during negotiations. And information technology has revolutionized the military's hi-tech operations, precision munitions, surveillance, etc. He wants to do the same to healthcare.

He touches on some of this during his NH townhall meeting.
http://video.c-span.org:8080/ramgen/idrive/project/c04/c04092603_clark.rm