David Brown: “Even when prevention greatly reduces future cases of a particular illness, overall cost to the health-care system typically goes up when lots of disease-preventing strategies are put into practice. This is usually true whether treating the preventable diseases is cheap or expensive.”
(via Ezra Klein)
Similar Posts:
- Will the spread of swine flu be affected by the uninsured?
- Will the public limit the degree of health reform?
- Support for the patient centered medical home in the House health reform bill
KevinMD.com on Facebook
{ 5 comments }
It’s just that people who would have been sick feel so much better, and are so much better able to enjoy life and contribute their energies to work and family and so forth. As IF that were the whole point of anyone ever seeking health care. Hardly worth it, wouldn’t you say, to achieve an irrelevent goal like THAT.
..Wait, what?
Well…….yeah. Dying early of the natural history of disease is usually cheaper. Whether that’s desirable, of course, is another matter.
Cheaper for who? And over what time scale?
If the only cost that matters is the cost to the health care system, then of course the cheapest outcome is for everyone to be stillborn. No costs at all.
Then of course we would run into the problem of trying to run a functioning society with no young people in it. Probably very cheap overall for the first fifteen years or so, as people who would otherwise be investing in childcare are freed up to invest instead in their professional lives, or to provide free care for their elders. Extremely cheap for the health-care system in particular as there are no childhood diseases to prevent. Yaay! No vaccines!
Over time a program of universal stillbirth is unsustainable. The costs become enormous as business collapses for lack of available labour. This of course would be reflected in… less and less health-care spending! No money to spend and no care to be supplied! Just like that, really, really cheap. Approaching free!
The fact is that there are outcomes of ill-health other than death. Lost productivity is one of them.
Likewise, disease has costs that are borne by other systems than “health-care.” When experienced workers have to cut their working hours because they have to care for an ill partner, that’s a cost. It’s just not one visible to the “health-care system.”
Saying that keeping people healthy and productive is more costly than having them become ill (and sometimes die) in middle age is completely cynical. The costs in lost productivity are borne by all of us.
This really sums up one of the problems with the whole concept of the tobacco lawsuits and settlements several years back. The theory was that states were having huge expenses that needed to be recovered. Aside from the fact that the huge per pack taxes already charged to smokers weren’t counted, it’s a sad fact that high smoking rates really do probably save government run health systems money in the long run. But that didn’t stop the god-awful master settlement agreement, and it sure didn’t stop Dickie Scruggs from making hundreds of millions of dollars.
It is why I don’t want anyone else to pay for my healthcare. I don’t spend my money to save money. I spend it to feel good–hopefully well into a parasitic retirement!
Comments on this entry are closed.