Well here’s a counterintuitive bit of information for your: According to the Congressional Budget Office’s blog (who knew they had one?) expanded preventative care raises healthcare costs, it doesn’t lower them. From the blog:
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. Judging the overall effect on medical spending requires analysts to calculate not just the savings from the relatively few individuals who would avoid more expensive treatment later, but also the costs of the many who would make greater use of preventive care.
This seems like the sort of thing that can and must be fixed.
Don’t forget that the profiteers of the Sickness Industry have no interest in prevention. Nobody makes money from prevention. All of the money and hope for profit comes from chronic disease. In our healthcare system, prevention is averting something decades into the future. Very few health insurance customers are customers for decades. And, like this post states, prevention actually increases the lifetime costs of healthcare for people in America. Why? Because half-dead and dying people suffering from decades of chronic illness are cash cows for the deliverers of sick care in America – the hospitals, the doctors, Big Pharma, and device manufacturers.
This will not change until the whole system’s incentives are flipped on it’s head. And don’t forget that the government may mandate that the current situation persist indefinitely. We simply will not have the opportunity to create a system with logical incentives, and, in fact, that will be illegal under federal law.