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Focusing on populations' health: population health insurance would focus on prevention instead of illness.

Article Excerpt
Last month I described state universal coverage initiatives. These efforts to extend health insurance to the uninsured are intended to insure persons and provide benefit coverage for illnesses. Hence, they more accurately could be called state universal illness insurance initiatives. Such insurance, of course, is critically important for persons with mental and substance use conditions.

This month I introduce a new concept: population health insurance. This insurance would be designed to provide coverage for a population (rather than a person) and would focus on health promotion and disease prevention (rather than on illness).

As we begin to develop the conceptual and operational framework for the Healthy People 2020 initiative (see Behavioral Healthcare January 2009, page 51), we are confronted with a situation in which we spend virtually all of our insurance dollars on illness, and virtually nothing on "upstream" activities to prevent or...