Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Simply extending health insurance to every American will not necessarily make Americans healthier.

Currently, more than 80 percent of Americans who have health insurance coverage must contend with an unhealthy crisis of epidemic proportions: chronic disease. As a nation, and certainly in Texas, chronic diseases such as diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease are becoming a greater problem in terms of lives and costs.

Seven out of 10 deaths are due to chronic disease. More than 133 million Americans have one or more chronic illnesses, and by 2023, the number of Americans with chronic disease is expected to be more than 230 million, according to the Milken Institute.

Chronic diseases are also largely responsible for the explosion in national health spending, which has increased 290 percent since 1987. Collectively, managing and treating chronic diseases are responsible for 85 percent of the $2 trillion that Americans spend on healthcare each year, and the numbers continue to climb.

We could start to reverse this trend tomorrow if we just focused our healthcare efforts on prevention.

Most Americans are not aware of how beneficial preventive care is to their health. Indeed, our actions speak loud and clear: In an average year, we spend less than $10 per person on preventive health, ignoring the health benefits of lifestyle changes or early detection and treatment. Instead, we focus on treating symptoms after they have worsened -- sometimes beyond repair. We practice "sick care" instead of healthcare.

That is why the American College of Preventive Medicine and AARP Texas recently joined to raise awareness about how healthful lifestyles can help Texans live with healthy hearts. Heart disease is on the loose in Texas and across the country and is the leading cause of death. Millions of lives -- and dollars -- could be saved if more Texans practiced healthful lifestyles.

Educating the public on how lifestyle habits can affect health is important, but we also need fundamental reforms in our health system that enable and encourage Americans to practice prevention. To truly fix our own health, and the state of our healthcare system, we need to rethink our system so that it promotes disease prevention and health promotion rather than disease treatment.

We can make this happen by improving health insurance coverage for effective preventive services such as immunizations, counseling and screening tests.

We must encourage employers to provide wellness incentives to their workers, improve care coordination by integrating primary care physicians into all care decisions, and help our children get off on the right foot by calling on our schools to refocus attention on physical education.

Many Americans face problems in accessing our healthcare system, but the facts of our chronic disease crisis show that unless our healthcare system treats what really ails us, and helps us to stay well, coverage itself is useless.

Dr. Michael Parkinson is president of the American College of Preventive Medicine. Bob Jackson is state director of AARP Texas.