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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (14359)	3/11/2010 2:22:52 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Childhood (and adult) obesity, smoking, bad diet, lack of exercise all contribute to chronic disease. Sure, but preventative medicine attempts aren't a very efficient way to address them. You can spend a lot on the effort and get very little in terms of results. Yes those people will get sick and die eventually anyway but during their lives, if they change their lifestyle, they will use less medical services and far fewer drugs. Not necessarily. Even for the people who do change their lifestyle, their living longer may mean more resources are used for health care over their lives. Well to be fair to your argument if the end of life costs are off in the future you can't reasonably compare them to the same costs now, you have to have some discount rate. But you have to make the effort for a lot of people to get one person that makes a major change in their lifestyle. People's lifestyles and habits tend to be "sticky" (often even if they want to change, and esp, if they don't). And not every person who does change will live longer or delay expensive medical costs. So you have a small fraction (the fraction of all people who make the change) multiplied by an unknown (possibly large) fraction (the fraction of people who live longer after and importantly because they make the change), to get the number of people who live longer. Then you multiple that by an unknown (possibly even negative) number, the dollars saved for each person who's life is increased. Without specific numbers of each factor (which are impossible to get with high accuracy, and may be impossible and certainly are at least difficult, to get with even just reasonable precision) we can't know how much is saved or even if anything is saved. None of that means I'm against preventive care. Done in moderation it doesn't have to be that expensive, and even if its a net increaser of costs it will cause some people to live longer healthier lives. Its just that I don't see how its going to save a significant amount of money, and it might easily not save any. Also even if it does save money, you don't need 2000 page government bills and trillions in new spending in order to get it. If it is a good idea, even if its a great idea that will also save a lot of money; it isn't a justification for the health care bills being considered in congress.

To: Road Walker who wrote (14359)	3/12/2010 9:40:14 AM
From: Lane3	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Childhood (and adult) obesity, smoking, bad diet, lack of exercise all contribute to chronic disease. These are not problems that require doctors, for the most part. They are mostly behavioral, like running red lights. Using the medical system on them is not cost effective. To the extent that we have a bad diet, generally, the federal government deserves much of the blame. So looking to a federal health care system to fix them is even less promising than using the medical system.