GOFFSTOWN – Rising costs in a health care system that is already the most expensive one in the world is a testament more to a crisis in health than in health care, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee told an American Solutions workshop at St. Anselm College yesterday.

The American health care system today costs $2 trillion, or 17 percent of the Gross Domestic Product, far more than the military, Huckabee said. By 2015, he said, the country could be spending as much as 20 percent of its GDP on health care.

Speaking at the college's New Hampshire Institute of Politics, he called the cost of health care the single greatest economic driver in American society.

But those rising costs speak more to a lack of healthy lifestyles than to problems in the health care system itself, the Republican presidential candidate said. About 80 percent of health care costs are due to chronic diseases and, on average, 80 percent of the lifetime cost for a person is normally consumed during the last 18 months of his life, he noted.

Care for children and adults is not what is creating the challenge, he said.

"It's that we don't run to the finish line, we don't even walk to the finish line, we don't even crawl to the finish line,." he said "We are basically dragged to the finish line with extraordinary, expensive, medical treatment which is brought about in large measure because by the time we get close to the finish line we are severely, chronically diseased."

Those chronic diseases in large part are caused by three behaviors, according to Huckabee: under-exercising, overeating, and smoking.

The current health care system, he said, takes an upside-down approach to dealing with unhealthy Americans. It focuses on addressing health problems at the end stages of a life, instead of preventing them before they become so expensive.

"What's more expensive?" Huckabee said. "A new oil filter or a new car?"

There is a big push by those who consider health insurance to be a Constitutional right to get all Americans covered under some kind of plan that provides the greatest amount of service for a modest price, Huckabee said.

But he warned that health insurance without individual choices, personal responsibility and accountability would only make the problem worse.

Huckabee also spoke out on the lack attention paid to the importance of music and art in the public schools, saying the American education system had become lopsided, emphasizing the use of the logical, left-side of the brain.

He said children need music and art to develop their creative, imaginative side, so they would know how to apply the knowledge they had acquired in their other classes.

Huckabee also had scheduled appearances yesterday at house parties in Franklin and Londonderry, as well as at events in Concord and Salem.