Thompson: strengthen public health system.

America needs to protect its citizens against biological terror attacks and to strengthen its public health system, Tommy G. Thompson, former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, said at the annual conference of the Property and Casualty Insurers Association of America in Seattle.

During his Nov. 7 speech, Thompson reiterated his own efforts to prepare the country against bioterror attacks and strengthen its reserve. Afterwards, he posed remedies for repairing the country's health-care system through preventive "human factors."

Thompson said he testified in May 2001 before a Senate subcommittee on the need for improvements in bioterrorism prevention. But nobody--neither the media nor "a Congress that rarely acts before a true crisis is upon the nation"--listened to his pleas until after Sept. 11, 2001.

"The wake-up call came in the ashes of Sept. 11 and the anthrax attacks on our nation four short weeks later," Thompson said. The nation saw "in those horrible days the limits of our ability to respond to a public health emergency."

The United States has spent some $15 billion over the past three years to rebuild its public health infrastructure, including state grants of nearly $4 billion and hospital preparedness grants of more than $1.5 billion. Also within the past four years, HHS funded a program that allows the department to monitor "all manners of public health behavior" to gauge potential problems.

It's a start, but it's not yet enough, he cautioned. "We have a 21st-century system to protect American health, just four years after the horse-and-buggy days of pre-9/11 America."

Thompson also spoke to concerns about food safety, highlighting the recent "spinach mess" in which many fell ill or died. That's why HHS increased spending on bioterror-related food security from $800,000 in 2001 to $150 million in 2006. That allows the federal government to inspect eight times more imported food shipments, he said.

Thompson said he also would like to see the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's food safety budget doubled, to $300 million, to beef up bioterrororelated food safety programs.

Responding to PCI member inquiries about the nation's vaccine capabilities in the light of bioterrorism, SARS, and the avian flu, Thompson attacked the nation's pharmaceutical industry and its vaccine-producing capabilities, noting the country has avian flu vaccine on hand for just 8 million Americans.

"We produce vaccine in the most idiotic way you can imagine," Thompson said. "The process is limited by the number of chickens used to lay eggs for the process; by the number of eggs actually produced; and by the number of vaccine components that can be injected into each egg."

Thompson said the United States is losing jobs to other countries, such as Canada, because the health-care system is too costly. And that will cost Americans jobs and affect the U.S. economy, he said.

"America will no longer be competitive," Thompson said. Currently, the United States spends some $2 trillion annually on health care, which equates to 16% of the country's gross domestic product. In six years, those figures will increase to $4 trillion and 21% of the country's GDP.

Meanwhile Japan's health-care costs amount to some 7% of that country's GDP.

Using major car manufacturers as examples, he noted that General Motors spends some $1,325 per auto made to subsidize its intracompany health-care system for employees. Toyota, on the other hand, spends $225 per auto on its health-care system. "That's why sales [at GM] will go down below 25% this year," he added.