Princeton Longevity Center Dr. David Fein

According to Internist Dr. David Fein of the newly opened Princeton Longevity Center in Fairfax, the advent of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act more commonly known as Obamacare will impel employers to take an active hand in promoting healthy life choices for their employees, inducing them to stay healthy as a way of keeping overall employer healthcare costs down.

According to Joanne Corte Grossi, regional director for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, who lectured in Reston this month, obesity and smoking alone account for more than $300 billion a year in U.S. health care costs, and are the numbers one and two most preventable causes of death.

Simply reducing one can of soda from the daily intake of an average person can shed 15 pounds in a years time, Fein said.

Healthcare reform will place an emphasis on being more proactive in preventing disease and at the same time, it will create two competing factors, Fein said. Uninsured patients will no longer use emergency rooms as their primary care and instead will begin to flood the offices of primary care physicians, who will see vastly increased numbers of patients, but re-imbursement rates will also be less, so physicians will need to see more patients to remain where they were before financially.

According to Grossi, there are currently 51 million uninsured Americans.

Fein said that as primary care physicians see higher numbers of patients, the average time that most will be able to allocate to each patient could shrink from 10 minutes to three on an average visit.

The result will be that patients will need to take a more active role in their own health care, he said.

Fein created the original Princeton Longevity Center in New Jersey 10 years ago as a way of catering to those who want to do just that.

The newest center opened in Fairfax in September.

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Longevity center opens in Fairfax