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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It?
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To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (81788)4/9/2010 2:06:40 PM
From: TimF1 Recommendation   of 224729
 
Preventive care, if paid for by the government, harms the deficit.

Much of it has little impact. Other forms that can have impact require you to provide it to a lot of people, in order to get any benefit. This application doesn't only have direct costs, it can increase later costs. For example diagnostic care is often considered preventive care. Administer a test and you don't only get true positives and true negatives, you get false positives and false negatives. The false positives mean that people get treatment or at least more tests, that cost money and can even harm them. The false negatives can mean result in people not responding correctly to their medical condition.

If you don't include diagnostics and you don't include treatment for a condition as preventive care, then the main category is medical education to change poor habits. Changing your diet and exercise patterns for health reasons can be a great idea. The problem is you can spend a ton on getting the message out with little result. If it was easy to change these habits people mostly would have already done so. Also sometimes the government puts out poor information itself which can make the problems worse.

Yes you can cherry pick or narrowly define preventive care so that it does save the government money, but broadly defined it doesn't.
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