What does health care have to do with the environment?

• Author: Fitz, Don
• Position: Looking at the US and Cuba

Should we call it the health care industry or the sickness industry? As you might guess, it makes more money the sicker you are, not from creating health. But did you suspect that it might be making the environment sick? Here's how.

If there weren't so many insurance companies, we wouldn't need so much cement and steel and all sorts of other construction materials. That would mean fewer buildings contributing to urban sprawl and habitat destruction.

It would mean less water used to construct and maintain buildings and less fossil fuel wasted for heating and cooling them. And, of course, less fuel would be used for transporting people to and from unproductive jobs. Fewer parking lots would mean more green space and less stormwater runoff.

Do you like forests? Imagine the trees that could be spared if a smaller sickness industry did not waste reams of paper for documenting and billing over and over and over.

Think of drugs that rarely help people get better and often make them worse: high-dose chemotherapy, proton pump inhibitors, hormone replacement therapy, anti-osteoporosis drugs, anti-depressants. If America was less addicted to prescription medication, fewer rivers in India would turn orange from the effluent of pharmaceutical factories and less land would become barren of anything green. Sewers in the US would be less filled with pills thrown into toilets and chemicals discharged from manufacturers.

How many MRI and CAT scan machines are used more for the bottom line of hospitals and medical offices than to promote health? If there were fewer diagnostic machines, there would be less need to extract rare metals from the Earth, transport them across oceans and combine them in factories thatwaste materials, energy and labor in producing excessive numbers of those machines. And there would be fewer "false positives" or indications of illnesses that aren't really there.

Think of all the people who get sicker by driving (or flying) to a hospital for a disease they don't have. There's probably even more who really are sick, but who won't be helped by a hospital stay which could give them an infection or a procedure which has more negative effects than positive ones. These include frontal lobotomies, tonsillectomies, hysterectomies, coronary artery catheterizations, cardiac stents, angioplasties and lower lumbar spinal fusions.

American society might actually be healthier with fewer hospital beds. The environment would indisputably be healthier...