A Practical Analysis of the Cost of Health Care
A Practical Analysis of the Cost of Health Care
In this analysis we demonstrate that preventive medicine does not necessarily save money in the long run.
A government cannot legislate healthy citizens, but many believe that federal intervention is necessary to provide citizens with access to health care. Health care professionals generally endorse preemptive tests such as mammograms and prostate exams. Such exams identify potentially serious health conditions at a stage when they can be addressed and possibly even corrected.
We assume for the purposes of this analysis that the government derives all income through taxes and fees. In other words, funds are confiscated from one segment of the population and subjectively distributed to another segment. Whether or not this is legal or even moral is not debated here.
Preventive medicine is a prostate exam every year, a mammogram each
year, etc. This author not opposed to preventive medicine. We simply quantify the monetary costs to society for these two tests when they are provided by the government to a large part of the populace.
Naturally, an individual who skips his prostate exam only to be struck
down by cancer would look back and say "wow, it sure would have been
cheaper to have that 5 minute test every year rather than pay for chemotherapy treatments."
However, asking the government (us) to pay for so-called 'free' exams for everyone
will cost much more to society as a whole.
A Cost Analysis
For example, breast cancer occurs in women at an overall rate of
123.8 per 100,000 women, or 0.1238 percent (about 1/10 of one per
cent). Generally, mammograms are recommended for women over the age of 30, all other factors being equal. Relying on census.gov, there are 151,627,727 females in the
country, of which about 48% are over 30. That's about 72,781,308
mammograms for the government to subsidize every year.
Assuming $250 per mammogram, we will be paying $18,195,327,240 per
year, or 18 billion dollars. We know that the mammogram procedure is purely diagnostic; it does not delay or prevent the onset of any disease or condition.
Assuming that .1238 per cent of the women actually contracted the cancer, that works out to about 90,103 cases per year.
That's a big number and it's horrifying to imagine the suffering that is behind that number.
Medicare reports an average treatment cost
per case of $20,964. If the government subsidizes the entire cost of all treatment for all 90 thousand cases, that works out to a total of $1,888,924,728.
That's about 2 billion dollars, or 1/9 of the cost of the preventive
procedure.
I'm not a doctor. I'm just presenting the numbers.
We see from this (narrow) analysis that preventive medicine does not necessarily save money in the long run.
Sources:
http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/breast.html
http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ST … CONTEXT=st
http://www.dentalplans.com/articles/335 … -soar.html
Conclusion
Some types of preventive medicine, when analyzed in the context of a government subsidized health care program, does not offer a cost savings. This analysis is extremely narrow and omits other benefit factors such as the emotional benefit of diagnostic tests and the increased awareness of diseases that claim so many otherwise healthy people.
