Some doubts:
No one really knows whether preventive medicine will save money in the long run, let alone free up the billions of dollars a year needed to help pay for universal health insurance. In fact, studies have shown that preventive care “” be it cancer screening, smoking cessation or plain old checkups “” usually ends up costing money. It makes people healthier, but it’s not free.
(via EconLog)
Related posts:
- Does preventive medicine save money or cost more in the long run?
- The myth that preventive medicine saves money
- How the government is banking on prevention to save money
- My take: Preventive medicine, Rhode Island, C-sections
- Preventive medicine meets Kinko’s
- CBO: Prevention does not save money
- Edwards: Mandating preventive visits
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Actually I have a book (i.e. old, not really all that new) that reviews most of the hundreds, if not thousands of studies in specific preventive interventions. Everybody knows (or should know) that prevention is very expensive because it is applied to thousands of people in an attempt to save one person. It is cost-effective for the person in whom serious complication was prevented, but not when you count the entire population.
It reminds me of the Giardasil controversy in Texas. Merck enticed the governor into mandating the vaccine statewide to save money, which it turns out was an assumption contrary to the data—the vaccine would cost 10 times as much as is spent now on treatmennt of cervical cancer for the entire state now.
The only medical care that is cost effective for the community is that which keeps working taxpayors working. Once you are past that point, it is a private good, not a public one–we make it a public expense at our peril.
It all depends on what is considered to be “preventative”. If you add alternative/wellness medicine then patient’s do better without expensive interventions. Europe does not have laws as in the U.S. that state that food does not “treat, cure or mitigate disease” therefore their alternative treatments are more integrated into medicine than in the US and a lot of their elderly live to ripe old age and die of natural causes. Cancers, obesity and other morbidities are less in those countries and may be because food comes to market right after it is picked in the fields, crops are rotated, soil stays nutritious and additives and preservatives are utilized less.
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