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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cogito who wrote (130519)	2/8/2010 9:40:27 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 542008

First of all, not every person who has high cholesterol needs to be put on a statin. True but your going to have a lot of people given a statin, or other treatment, for each life saved. Many who have the statin will die anyway. Many others would not have died anyway. A few will probably even die, when they wouldn't without having taken the staten, its not like there is no unwanted effects. I'm pretty sure the additional deaths are lower, perhaps much lower, than the lives saved, but they still need to be considered. And then when you do actually save a life, have you reduced costs, they may still need other expensive treatment anyway, and in the mean time you've spent a lot on the statin for them. Thinking about it, for that specific person's case you've probably save money, perhaps even a lot of money, but you've increased costs in the others. Secondly, does it not seem a bit screwed up that using a statin costs so much? We're back to that pharmaceutical issue again. The $150K a year is not the costs of the statins, its the cost of the statins per life saved. You have to get quite a few people/years to save one life.