Throughout the 2008 campaign, both Obama and McCain have been pushing preventative-care programs as a solution to exploding health care costs. Which seems sensible enough given that, from a logic standpoint, it sounds like a flawless cost-saving strategy: We take measures to stamp out diseases and other health problems before they start, and save ourselves the costs (both in care and increasingly precious doctor hours) of treating them later.
The only problem is that preventative care may not save money at all. A recent paper in the New England Journal of Medicine found that rather than cutting costs, preventative-care plans often wind up costing more than treatment. Written by Tufts health-policy researchers Joshua Cohen and Peter Neumann and Harvard professor of health policy Milton Weinstein, the paper declares that “[s]weeping statements about the cost-saving potential of prevention … are overreaching” since “[s]tudies have concluded that preventing illness can in some cases save money but in other cases can add to health care costs.”
