SC lawmakers can help people avoid hospitals by regulating high calorie food sales

What is your choice for health care?

The Leapfrog Group recently released its safety grades for hospitals nationally. In Columbia, the largest hospital, Prisma Health Richland, got a C safety grade. Prisma Health Baptist and MUSC Columbia Health Center Downtown each received a B grade. Lexington Medical Center earned an A.

The conclusion is that Lexington Medical Center has the safest practices of any of the largest, graded hospitals in Columbia.

We should have a choice of hospitals, surgeons, and physicians in South Carolina, throughout the United States, and abroad. There are options.

Our best choices should be discovered in consultation with our primary care physician or surgeons who have evaluated our health and our insurance providers.

Many people will simply choose the hospital closest to home — if they have a choice.

Searching for the best health care takes time, if we have time, to educate ourselves on the training, skills, outcomes, and complication rates achieved by specific physicians and surgeons, hospitals that are safest, what insurance plans cover, and the side-effects and cost of drugs.

The best route, considering the significant quality variation among hospitals and physicians, is to avoid the need for hospitals and surgeons.

The more we study physicians, surgeons, drugs, insurance limitations, costs, and hospital safety, the more we should conclude that our best option is to be healthy enough — in what and how much we eat and drink and how we exercise — that we will not need surgery, risky treatment, and expensive drugs that have dangerous side effects, and time spent in a hospital that is not safe for anyone, the patient, visitors, nurses, or others.

There are, traditionally, two behaviors that make people likely to need a hospital, a surgeon, and drugs.

Those behaviors are smoking cigarettes and being obese — significantly overweight. Both smoking and being obese are addictions, encouraged by our society.

We have dramatically reduced cigarette smokers, from 45% of adults in 1954 to only 12.5% in 2020. Smoking is banned in many places today. It was quite fashionable in the 1940s, and into the 1950s.

Laws were passed to let everyone know smoking is unhealthy to smokers and non-smokers who breathe second-hand smoke.

Our society has eliminated tobacco addiction for many. Although, we want to ban flavored vaping products, which are extremely attractive to children and teenagers.

Obesity has been dramatically increasing over the last 50 years by about one percentage point per year, given that people are getting little exercise, many hours of screen time, and an abundance of high calorie processed foods. Obesity is a disease, welcoming diabetes and coronary heart disease into the body.

Like smoking, obesity is a problem for society, benefiting food and soft drink manufacturers, fast-food retailers, and others who increase their profits to the detriment of the health of children and adults. Our society encourages obesity.

If our legislators really want to pass legislation that has a direct impact on the human body, regardless of gender, insist that our lawmakers regulate the manufacturing, advertising, marketing, labeling, and sale of food and drink that contains excessive levels of sugar, fat, and salt.

In South Carolina and nationally, we must reduce the availability of unhealthy foods and make healthy foods available at a reasonable price in every neighborhood.

We can move toward healthy lifestyles — but still take time to learn how to choose the best hospitals and best surgeons, should we need them.

Emerson Smith is a PhD Sociologist, a Clinical Research Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine at the USC School of Medicine at Columbia, and President of Metromark Research.