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

To: Road Walker who wrote (14494)	3/13/2010 8:05:04 PM
From: Lane3	1 Recommendation Respond to of 42652

Well I know this will be taken as worth 2 cents on this thread but intuitively, and from personal experience, I'm 100% certain that we can save a lot of health care $'s by changing some habits. I can't see it. I have to think that you're only looking at part of the equation. I suspect you're comparing the cost of prevention with the cost saved from whatever disease it is you're preventing. In doing so you're not considering the offsetting cost of treating whatever else the person may contract after he would have died from what you prevented nor the cost of his inevitable death from something or other. I suspect that what you're looking at as savings is just costs postponed. Unless we die suddenly while apparently healthy or eschew doctors, we all incur significant medical costs. [I post about my ninety-something relatives in Tucson a lot. They haven't cost the system much at all. They have had a cheap HMO for decades, have never been offered a colonoscopy or even regular blood work. Zero preventive care. All but my dad are still alive. He made it to 94. He never saw a doctor until about two years before he died and only then because his prostate left him unable to urinate so he had to do something--he drove to the ER. I doubt his lifetime medical costs were over 20K. That's how you save the system money. Don't use it.] If so... maybe health care isn't the root problem. I think you've got something there.

To: Road Walker who wrote (14494)	3/16/2010 3:34:59 PM
From: TimF	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

I'm 100% certain that we can save a lot of health care $'s by changing some habits. I'm not quite 100% certain, but I think its a very reasonable statement. The problem is that changing habits is hard, and while actually changing habits may be cost effective (esp. if your considering worse health care outcomes as a cost, and if your considering all payers of the costs not just government programs that pay), the attempt to get people to change might not be. You try to change 30 people, you get one person that changes in a durable way. That person dies anyway (our mortality rate is 100% after all), probably of something expensive, but maybe a decade later. The cost a decade later should be discounted for time, so even if its the same (or if its slightly less but you have small ordinary health care costs occurring before the end 10 years later that wouldn't have occurred if the patient died earlier), the fact that the costs are incurred later makes for a real savings for that person case. But is it enough to still be a real savings when you consider the ineffective effort on the other 29? And all that assumes that the change your trying to make is the correct one. A number of government health messages have been questionable at best.