Green healthcare reform

Devereaux Bell explains how healthcare reform could be good for the environment.

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Devereaux Bell

Tue, Aug 25 2009 at 7:21 AM

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Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Obama, Congress

PRESIDENT'S AGENDA: President Obama speaking about healthcare at a town hall meeting. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Healthcare in America is a 2.5 trillion-dollar-a-year industry -- nearly a seventh of our economy. Something that big leaves a giant environmental footprint: billions of trees destroyed for paper, millions of tons of pollution and waste, and nearly a thousand trillion BTUs of energy each year. (That’s a lot.) Hospitals are more than twice as energy intense as commercial office buildings -- producing more than two times the carbon emissions.

To the green-minded, this is all very painful. But, alas, healthcare is in the midst of reform. And along with likely changes -- because of them, in fact -- the industry’s environmental impact can be reduced. Providing health services in America could soon become a much greener affair.

In fact, a green trend is already underway. The stimulus bill passed earlier this year is working to reduce healthcare’s paper footprint. A $20 billion health IT portion of the legislation will go a long way toward implementing electronic health records (EHR). Paperwork -- and thus paper-consumption -- will be drastically reduced, if not ultimately eliminated, with the creation of a National Health Information Network. And since the stimulus employs powerful incentives for physicians to switch to EHR -- we’re due for a genuine sea-change toward more environmentally sound healthcare.

But still, a lot more can be done. Hospitals needn’t use nearly so much energy. And while the stimulus bill doesn’t help us here, the health reform legislation currently working its way through Congress could realistically ensure significant energy reductions.

The final bill could mandate certain standards for hospital construction and administration that would go a long way toward reducing energy use. For example, a LEED rating system could be applied to all hospital construction, renovation, and operation. Similarly, Congress could require that all hospital purchases use the EPEAT system, allowing purchasers to evaluate, compare and select computers and other electronics based on their environmental attributes. According to the Department of Energy, full implementation of the EPEAT system in American hospitals could reduce hospital energy use by three percent annually or by 30 percent (of 1990 levels) over six years.

What about reducing hospital pollution? America’s hospitals generate nearly 7,000 tons of waste (infectious, hazardous, and solid) each day. And while most of the tools for reducing material waste lie outside the scope of insurance reform legislation, an environmental impact study along with treatment effectiveness studies could help.

Along with reducing pollution, the EPA has studied the effect of toxic waste on the environmental impact of America’s hospitals. Toxic materials “such as mercury, PVC, DEHP, cleaning materials, flame retardants, pesticides, and other similar products” are overused. And while in most cases these materials are genuinely needed, there are a number of toxic-using medical procedures that have less-toxic alternatives. Final insurance legislation could insist that public insurance plans (at least) no longer cover the more toxic alternatives. Greening hospital cleaning materials -- for instance, by ensuring they are mostly natural or organic, as much of the food services industry has done -- and reductions in pesticide use are being explored.

Since one of the main goals of health insurance reform is a drastic reduction of the cost of healthcare, it’s almost a sure bet that waste will be reduced. President Obama has touted a measure that would change Medicare payments so as to eliminate “duplicative tests ordered by different doctors for the same patient”.

Healthcare experts have repeatedly shown that such duplication happens all the time -- almost as a mater of course. According to research cited by the Congressional Budget Office, Medicare spending could be reduced by 30 percent by eliminating inefficiencies. And since a good deal of these inefficiencies are due to duplicated tests, all of which use up energy and materials, overall energy and material use could be brought down significantly.

Green healthcare may not be right around the corner, but if reform passes, some significant environmental improvements seem inevitable.

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Comment: 1

Stephen Tvedten Aug 25 2009 at 3:16 PM

How to kill pests without killing yourself or the earth...... Americans rank their fear of pest infestations third - only after their fear of fire and natural disaster - on the list of threats to their homes that they worry about most. This is why the buSINess of pest control is so lucrative and effects so many of us. There are about 50 to 60 million insect species on earth - we have named only about 1 million and there are only about 1 thousand pest species - already over 50% of these thousand

.... More

pests are already resistant to our volatile, dangerous, synthetic pesticide POISONS. We accidentally lose about 25,000 to 100,000 species of insects, plants and animals every year due to "man's footprint". But, after poisoning the entire world and contaminating every living thing for over 60 years with these dangerous and ineffective pesticide POISONS we have not even controlled much less eliminated even one pest species and every year we use/misuse more and more pesticide POISONS to try to "keep up"! Even with all of this expensive and unnecessary pollution - we lose more and more crops and lives to these thousand pests every year. We are losing the war against these thousand pests mainly because we insist on using only synthetic pesticide POISONS and fertilizers There has been a severe "knowledge drought" - a worldwide decline in agricultural R&D, especially in production research and safe, more effective pest control since the advent of synthetic pesticide POISONS and fertilizers. Today we are like lemmings running to the sea insisting that is the "right way". The greatest challenge facing humanity this century is the necessity for us to double our global food production with less land, less water, less nutrients, less science, frequent droughts, more and more contamination and ever-increasing pest damage. National Poison Prevention Week, March 18-24,2007 was created to highlight the dangers of poisoning and how to prevent it. One study shows that about 70,000 children in the USA were involved in common household pesticide-related (acute) poisonings or exposures in 2004. At least two peer-reviewed studies have described associations between autism rates and pesticides (D'Amelio et al 2005; Roberts EM et al 2007 in EHP). It is estimated that 300,000 farm workers suffer acute pesticide poisoning each year just in the United States - No one is checking chronic contamination. In order to try to help "stem the tide", I have just finished re-writing my IPM encyclopedia entitled: THE BEST CONTROL II, that contains over 2,800 safe and far more effective alternatives to pesticide POISONS. This latest copyrighted work is about 1,900 pages in length and is now being updated at my new website at http://www.thebestcontrol2.com . This new website at http://www.thebestcontrol2.com has been basically updated; all we have left to update is Chapter 39 and to renumber the pages. All of these copyrighted items are free for you to read and/or download. There is simply no need to POISON yourself or your family or to have any pest problems. Stephen L. Tvedten 2530 Hayes Street Marne, Michigan 49435 1-616-677-1261http://www.theidealpesticide.com When a man who is honestly mistaken hears the truth, he will either quit being mistaken or cease to be honest.

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