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Show 1 . BY RICK KINNERSLEY President Bad Health Habits are Costly overweight face a greater risk of disease and death from all major disease including; high blood pressure, stroke, heart attack and digestive diseases, than the people who control their weight. For those who smoke and are overweight the risk of a visit to the hospital for treatment of disease or disability doubles. In fact, according ' to the New England Journal of Medicine we could reduce the cost of health care in the U.S. by $8.2 billion every year if people would just stop smoking. State Mutual Life Insurance Company of America jumped on the stop smoking campaign. They discovered that smokers shorten their productive life span by seven years and that smoking is the number one cause of death in the home. Property damage annually in the U.S. is more than $27.5 billion dollars as a result of fires from smokers. It is clear that we're not spending enough time or energy to improve our health habits and it's costing us as a state and nation literally billions, and billions of dollars. Proper health maintenance is at least one way to save on the costs of health care. Hospitals throughout the nation and in Utah are engaged in a voluntary volun-tary effort to control advancing hospital costs. Some imaginative ways to save have surfaced reducing the rate of inflation for hospitals below the consumer price index for the past 16 months. In the last report hospital prices were advancing at an annual rate of a little over 12 percent while the cost of everything else was over 18 percent. This translates into bargain prices in hospital health care when compared to food, gasoline and other services. The problem, of course, is why purchase pur-chase a service unless you need it, even if it is on sale. The best way to save on hospital costs is to stay out of the hospital. You may ask, how can I do that. If I get real sick I might have to go to the hospital. And when you need a hospital nothing else will do, that's true. But what if we all worked together to protect our health and our future productive years so we didn't have to go to the hospital. This would possibly be the best way to voluntarily voluntari-ly control hospital costs. The National Institute of Health, Task Force on Obesity reported recently that people who are i i UTAH HOSPITAL ASSOCIATION &3 |