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Politics : A US National Health Care System?

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To: Road Walker who wrote (14470)	3/13/2010 10:18:06 AM
From: Lane3	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) of 42652

it doesn't mean a "medical professional" (read expensive person) has to serve that function. It's more education than it is is treatment... a "health teacher"???? OK, a relatively inexpensive person. Like doctors typically send patients who are obese or have high blood sugar to nutritionists, which cost less than doctors. Even inexpensive consultations have costs. So the question remains whether the health care system paying to send everyone approaching a middle-age spread to a nutritionist will save the health care system money in the long run. You have to consider what advice is being given, whether the patient follows it, and any overhead for follow-up. And whether it ends up making a difference a large enough percentage of the patients referred. Even with a positive result, the same result could have been obtained for free via mom. It's an iffy proposition to try to gauge the cost effectiveness to the system of prevention. If you take something straight forward like smoking cessation, yes, that's pretty cheap compared to the costs of lung cancer and heart disease and, yes, it works on a large percentage of the people who try it. But if all you accomplish is keeping that person alive long enough to die from something just as expensive or even more expensive, you haven't saved money. Now, most prevention is much less clear cut than that. If you can't demonstrate savings on the obvious ones, the rest are even iffier. The cost effectiveness of system-paid prevention cannot be shown either way. There are just too many variables and too little information. It wouldn't be ethical to do a study that would prove it. So it's a crap shoot. You might be able to justify system-paid prevention on a quality of life basis but not on a cost basis.

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