Preventive Care: saving lives and money
You’ve likely heard the old saying that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” but what exactly is preventive care, and is it really worth anything?
What is Preventive Care?
According to Independence Blue Cross, “Preventive care is the care you receive to prevent illnesses or diseases. It also includes counseling to prevent health problems.” This kind of care includes a wide variety of options from annual physical examinations, to blood pressure screening, to behavioral therapy for obesity and smoking cessation. Preventive care differs from diagnostic medical care which refers to treating an existing medical problem, including follow-up by your physician. Preventive care is intended to detect a potential medical problem early and thereby avoid or reduce the need for advanced and expensive medical care.
Does Preventive Care Save Lives?
There is little doubt that preventive care can save lives. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) notes that chronic diseases that are responsible for 70% of deaths — such as heart, cancer and diabetes — can be largely avoided when preventive care is applied. Independent researchers of preventive medicine have found that the use of specific preventive services such as daily aspirin use, and smoking cessation counseling can reduce annual life-years lost to disease by more than 2 million. And a panel convened by the National Coalition on Health Care reported that “vaccination of children born between 1994 and 2016 has prevented 381 million illnesses and avoided 855,000 early deaths.”
Does Preventive Care Save Money?
Preventive care can save significant direct costs to individuals that are associated with advanced medical care, and indirect costs to society such as lost productivity. The American Heart Association reports that employees with cardiovascular disease (CVD), “costs his or her employer nearly 60 hours and over $1,100 more in lost productivity per year than an employee without CVD.”
Savings estimates vary, depending upon how cost analysis is conducted, but in one analysis researchers found that an increase in the use of preventive care services would yield $3.7 billion savings, which is about 0.2 percent of all personal health care cost in the United States. According to the CDC, “every dollar spent on childhood vaccines saves $10” and a National Coalition on Health Care expert panel reported that, “Containing just one case of measles costs about $140,000.”
It is worth noting that not all forms of preventive care are equally cost effective. Mammography screening, for example, has been shown to reduce breast cancer deaths by less than 20%, and to also exhibit false positive results 85% of the time. These results then require additional conformational procedures such as biopsy.
Obstacles to Preventive Care
Although preventive care is shown to save lives and save money, the CDC estimates that Americans use preventive care at only about one-half the recommended rate. The reasons for this low rate of adoption are many, but one reason stands out, the cost of preventive care to the individual. Although preventive care is often covered by medical insurance, some 28 million Americans — about one-in-ten — have no insurance coverage and can’t afford even basic preventive care. Among those who do have medical insurance, many cannot afford co-payments when preventive care is not completely covered by medical insurance.
In terms of life-saving and money-saving, preventive care is clearly worthwhile. Increasing preventive care to save more lives and money will require solutions that make health care accessible to more Americans, possibly funding those solutions through the cost savings that preventive care creates.
