Let me start by saying that any article, blog, website, white paper, essay or other written communication that include  "onomics" as part of any word in it, is, by its nature, going to be hard for most of us.  Huh? 

At college I was forced to take two quarters of economics.  One was Micro Economics and the other Macro Economics.  One of the two courses, I can't remember which one, was either taught by one of the worst teachers in the history of the earth, or we were the dumbest clods at the dirt farm, because I passed the course with a 35 average that was curved up to a solid high C.  I decided at that time that Economics from a book is just plain hard for the average JoeBob.

Which brings me back around to the "3^rd Law of Healthonomics" and specifically an ad I saw in Business Week this week for a website called http://www.hsaeducator.com/www.CenterVBHM.com%20.  It's an informational site, geared towards employers, to help them lower health costs.  Anyway, the 3^rd Law according to them states: "Soaring healthcare costs are only the symptoms.  You've got to start treating the disease." 

Now I don't know much formally about economics.  Pretty much everything I learned in school was deposited in a wastebasket about 5 minutes after my final exam a million years ago.  But I do understand the concept put forth in this ad.  In fact, several editions of the Gradock Bulletin have focused on this very subject (Not Fairy Godmother for one).

 Anyway the point of the clever ad is that in order to bring down healthcare costs, we must dig below the symptoms on the surface of healthcare issues and treat the actual disease.  In case you missed it, that is the economics part of "The 3^rd Law of Healthonomics."   I go a step further and say that if you educate people and you help them see the light of taking care of their own bodies, in many cases the disease will never manifest itself, leading to an even greater economic benefit.  That probably has its own law but I haven't spent enough time at the site to read all the laws.   Sounds like Consumer Driven Health (CDH) at work.