[DanielBMarkham]

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.

[david927]

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.

[DanielBMarkham]

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.