Item — HN Reader

While that's a very interesting point, and I haven't heard it before so I'll look it up, my main point remains. Because of socialized health care, other countries can focus on prevention, which is much cheaper and effective then dumping money and effort at the point of crisis.

A quick anecdote: my friend and I here were laughing because in both cases our pregnant wives went to the doctor about a small concern and were put in the hospital for a week for testing. But I thought about it later, and that wouldn't happen in America. You're churned out as fast as possible. The great side effect, and I think you'll see this on infant mortality rates as well, despite what you've said, is that if health care is free, people use it earlier than the crisis point. And that's cheaper and better for everyone.

1 comments

Prevention does not save money.

Or rather, it saves money for the individual who has something worthy of being prevented. For that person, it's much easier to find something and/or prevent it early rather than wait until it gets serious. This is why prevention seems like such a common sense thing.

For society at large, however, testing and servicing all of the other people -- the people who never will get the thing you're trying to prevent -- ends up spending more than the treating person who got it later.

It's one of those things that sounds good when you say it, but the statistics don't back it up.

That's a horribly spurious statement. What statistics? What the hell kind of statistics can you have that would back up something like that? 1) It depends on how you do the prevention, and how you handle the event itself. 2) A lot of people would probably die without preventative measures, making it very cheap indeed. 3) What is the point of medicine if we afraid it's going to cost more? Medicine is about preventing.

But it's not more expensive. Most European countries spend much less on health care, but much more on prevention. It's very effective, and at the end of the day, it's really what medicine is about.

Here's an article written before the current debate

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/540199

...After all the consequences are accounted for, very few services of any kind save more money than the cost incurred. Childhood vaccines are among the rare examples that actually are cost-saving...

Of course, there's more to universal health care than just saving money. Once you politicize it, it's more about doing and saying things to keep those votes coming in.