Obama, since he started his candidacy, has used somewhat rosy numbers to calculate the costs and benefits of the policies he advocates. His first big one was the promise of “tax cuts” for the poor and middle class, do you remember, even for people who don’t pay income taxes in order to “spread the wealth around”? And added to that he was also going to reduce the national debt. Yeah, campaigns are historically full of wishful promises.
After inauguration this didn’t change though. Right away we had the obnoxiously obese stimulus bill. That was based on the rosiest of rosy turn-arounds and unemployment rates. It was hard-core wrong of course, things rarely have the best possible outcome.
So let’s remember this as we examine new legislation. Here is a prime example of a rosy assumption in this health care reform effort: if we put money into prevention it will save the new health care system money in the future. That sounds perfectly logical. Seriously! Let’s make sure we treat our diabetes so we don’t have the expense of foot removal.
In some cases this logic will apply. Someone who suffers from seizures, for example, can
sometimes be easily treated with a cheap daily medicine (It’s seriously cheap, my dog is on it). The alternative would be a person seizing and falling on the floor and getting hurt all the time – costing money.
However, according to the Congressional Budget Office, prevention would at best result in marginal savings, and could very well cost more. Here is a good article on the subject:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124476182985608115.html#articleTabs%3Darticle
Disease prevention, like cancer screens, is money spent on people who weren’t going to get sick anyway. You have to screen a lot of people to find the sick ones and you get false positives that require further tests. And life style change is a touchy subject. Even if our society takes the path of compelling people to live a certain way, changing that behavior is about impossible. Look at all the expensive stop-smoking programs – and holy crap look at the diet industry.
Even though cancer, heart attacks, and other common problems are expensive to treat, preventing them isn’t any cheaper when budgeting for a whole society, and as technology improves and creates better screens it will likely get more expensive. And worse, prevention would produce another large cost these types of programs are rarely constructed to handle: people not dying at a convenient age. That is one of the main problems with Social Security. During FDR’s time you were doing well to reach 65 – now you have to get into a car accident to die that young.
Now – if you’re a person who has a difficult time grasping overall subjects and main ideas – you might disagree with a perceived conclusion – I don’t believe in prevention. If that’s the case you can relax. I haven’t made a conclusion.
Here is my conclusion: Contrary to the idea Obama is trying to sell us, prevention won’t be one of the things that miraculously gives all Americans access to health care without raising taxes on the non-rich.
So see, you had nothing to be disagreeable about. In fact, I very much believe in prevention. I
also believe in health care/insurance reform. Specifically, I believe in leaving health care the hell alone, for the most part, and focus more on an electronic medical records standard and ways to grow the medical field. Insurance laws need some changes. People get screwed way too often and you should be able to buy into groups outside of an employer.
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Raging Kitty