Chronic disease expert: U.S. health care system needs to treat 'whole person'

Kaiser Health News staff writer Jessica Marcy interviews Kate Lorig, director of the Patient Education Research Center at Stanford University, about the toll of chronic diseases. "As people live longer, chronic diseases have skyrocketed. … But the health system remains largely designed to treat people with acute problems and often provides fragmented care. The National Council on Aging (NCOA) found that 80 percent of adults age 65 or older have at least one chronic disease and 50 percent have more than one. One-third of them feel confused about how to manage their disease after seeing a doctor" (Marcy, 6/25). Read entire article.

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This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.