Posted on 03/09/2010 6:59:01 PM PST by hagendaz
I keep hearing Obama and Pelosi saying we need to increase preventative care to lower the cost of healthcare.
I would concede the point that preventative care can potentially improve the quality and length of one’s life, but how does it lower healthcare costs in the long run? Isn’t someone who takes great care of his or herself going to require more healthcare over their life than someone who eats fast food every day and drops dead of a massive coronary at age 50. Does preventative care prevent death? Well until it does, I have to assume we will all still be dying of something eventually, and the stronger you are when the Grim Reaper comes to punch your card the longer he will have to sit around waiting in the hospital for your body to give out. Again, my argument here is not to debate the obvious benefits of preventative care and staying healthy, It’s a personal choice I would recommend to everyone. My only point is that people who take care of themselves presumably live longer, and thus die later in life so their required end of life care will presumably last longer as does the period of their life when they are consuming massive amounts of pharmaceuticals.
Is my logic flawed?
On the other hand maybe Nancy and Obama's only concern is to get us to prevent any serious health problems till we are each old enough (60 or so) as to ONLY be eligible for Obama’s pain killer health plan.
Obama doesn’t know what he’s talking about, as usual.
We are all very ill with mortality so preventative care will have any effect at all on that disease.
However, preventative care does add to the quality of life as one ages.
See my tag line for more information. I co-opted it from my friend who is 99 years and 8 months old.
Perhaps we shouldn’t have health care at all. Why interfere with God’s plans for us? If we get sepsis or pneumonia or an infection, just let it run its course.
After all, if we take penicillin or an antibiotic and our cured, won’t we just need more care later on, and won’t it cost more money?
Let the strong survive and the weak be winnowed before they breed more of their pathetic strain!
Unless they can afford to pay for the treatments themselves, out of their own pocket. Those people - the ones who have learned how to make enough money to care for themselves - deserve to live. They’ve proven it with their bank accounts.
But free the rest of us from having to support the rest of the losers.
So, am I being sarcastic or not?
But that logic presumes that once a “life threatening” condition is caught, if it’s late in the game, the person would die from it w/out having it treated.
For example: Early breast cancer detection can lead to a lumpectomy perhaps w/out the need for radiation or chemotherapy. Late stage breast cancer detection, leads to more extensive surgery, chemo, radiation, etc. And even w/late stage detection, the patient could live for years. Therefore the cost of early detection does save money. Your presumption is that they will die from late detection, which is not necessarily the case.
Preventive care?? Didnt they try to stop women from having Testing for Breast Cancer (Mammograms) until after 50?
Is that the preventive care they are talking about?
They say that we need more preventative healthcare, but then they also say that we have too many tests. What do they think tests are? They are preventative healthcare. They are simply talking out of both sides of their mouth.
You’re right. It’s been known since the 1980s that preventive care increases total expenditure for the population even as it lowers individual risk. The reason is that it costs so much to screen everyone to find an unusual case of whatever.
The US spends far more on preventive care than countries with government run health care. The reason is that individuals are willing to spend more to lower their risk. Government bean counters can only see costs. To them, people are costs and preventive care is something that can easily be cut. After all, only a few die from lack of it.
Some serious conditions like cancer cannot be prevented only diagnosed early when their is a good chance for cure or treatment. Are screenings like mammograms cost effective? Probably not for the number of cancers actually detected, but for the small number of women whose cancers are caught early because of mammograms the screening is lifesaving.
It is a fabrication!
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/358/7/661
In addition, however, they found that (1) chronic disease management is expensive, (2) since people live longer, they pile up additional Medicare costs, and (3) when they finally die, instead of dying quickly of a heart attack or pneumonia, they are much more likely to die of cancer, which is really expensive, often costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Although preventive care can help people live longer, it doesn't necessarily save money.
IMO it’s all in the genes!
They do not want to prevent disease, they want to prevent care.
Taking care of yourself (diet, exercise, hygiene, don’t smoke, don’t drink to excess, don’t drive recklessly, monogamy) are all the prevention that matter. All the advice your mom gave you for free. Other than vaccines “preventive care” is expensive BS.
Actually, most preventative care isn’t really helpful in reducing costs, even though it does increase lifespan.
One problem is that you get treated for things that would fix themselves in time.
Another is that the preventative care reduces the cost for a particular person who is discovered to be sick, but the savings don’t come close to covering the cost for all the preventative care that reveals nothing.
Another is that the false positives in preventative care lead to a lot of costly tests to rule out problems that otherwise would never have been thought to exist.
In essence, the data tends to show that if patients do as advised, preventative care extends life and makes for a higher quality of life. Unfortunately, patients commonly fail to make the necessary lifestyle changes.
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