Preventative Health Care Savings? Don’t Count on It
Jake Tapper at ABC points to more bad news for socialists who seek to justify their takeover of health care in America. Those savings from preventative care the libs were counting on to provide some reduction in the massive costs of government health care? Don’t count on it.
Douglas W. Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, tells us something that most of us would find rather obvious…if we (a) weren’t dining on a diet of liberal propaganda, or (b) stopped for a minute to think about it:
“Although different types of preventive care have different effects on spending, the evidence suggests that for most preventive services, expanded utilization leads to higher, not lower, medical spending overall,” Elmendorf wrote. “That result may seem counterintuitive.
“For example, many observers point to cases in which a simple medical test, if given early enough, can reveal a condition that is treatable at a fraction of the cost of treating that same illness after it has progressed. In such cases, an ounce of prevention improves health and reduces spending — for that individual,” Elmendorf wrote. “But when analyzing the effects of preventive care on total spending for health care, it is important to recognize that doctors do not know beforehand which patients are going to develop costly illnesses. To avert one case of acute illness, it is usually necessary to provide preventive care to many patients, most of whom would not have suffered that illness anyway. … Researchers who have examined the effects of preventive care generally find that the added costs of widespread use of preventive services tend to exceed the savings from averted illness.”
Elmendorf’s assessment can be read here.
Simple common sense tells you that while preventative testing and screening may avoid the expensive costs of surgery and treatment for one person, there are probably 10, 20, 50 or more other people for whom those multiple and repeated testings will be a total waste of money–they never would have been stricken with that same illness in the first place.
What’s more, as I frequently point out, when you make health care “free,” people will over-use it. It’s a part of the fallen human nature to look for a free ride and to take advantage of someone else for your own comfort. People will utilize “free” government health care for things they wouldn’t dream of if they had to open their wallet to pay for it. I have seen this phenomenon over and over and over in the military health care system and during the three years I spent in Great Britain under their National Health Service.
If you still don’t believe me, consider this 2004 report from the British Times newspaper:
A total of 1,282,900 people in England have jobs with the NHS: 2 per cent of the 30 million people of working age.
Only the Chinese Army and the Indian State Railways are believed to employ more people — with 2.3 million and 1.5 million staff respectively — but both workforces represent a far smaller proportion of the national populations.
According to the latest workforce census, the NHS employs 386,400 nurses — matching the entire population of Edinburgh — 109,000 doctors and 122,100 scientists and other therapists.
An extra 18,800 nurses were employed in 2003, up 5.1 per cent on the previous year, and there were 5,600 more doctors — an increase of 5.5 per cent. Although the number of managers rose by a relatively modest 3,000, this amounted to a 9.4 per cent increase in a year — almost double the growth rate in nurses’ numbers.
Those numbers are absolutely staggering. It’s simple ole’ human nature at work, folks. And human nature is something that, while capitalism tends to take into consideration and mitigate, socialism pretends does not exist. That is why socialism fails every time and everywhere it is tried.
The next time a liberal tries to sell you on all the “savings” a government health care plan would bring, give them a counter-offer of some really good ocean-front property in Arizona.
HT Weekly Standard.
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