Here are the key points from an excellent column up over at the
New York Times by Margot Sanger-Katz:
- The argument for cost savings from universal preventive health coverage makes some intuitive sense, but it’s wrong. There’s strong evidence from a variety of sources that people who have health insurance spend more on medical care than people who don’t. Almost all preventive health care costs more than it saves.
- There are three main reasons health spending is ticking up:
- The aging of the population; people get sicker as they age;
- The improving economy, which will enable more people to afford medical care — or the time off from work it might take to attend to their health needs; and a big one
- Obamacare’s coverage expansion.
- For the individual patient whose heart attack is prevented by a cholesterol screening, to give one example, that blood test is a cost-saver. But to prevent one heart attack, the health care system has to test hundreds of healthy people — and give about a hundred of them cholesterol-lowering drugs for at least five years. Added together, those prevention measures cost more than is saved on the one heart attack treatment.
- There’s also the unavoidable fact that every time you prevent people from dying from one disease, they are likely to live longer and incur future medical expenses.
