QUARTERLY NEWSLETTER | SPRING 2023 – #44
Preventative Care Done Right Can Save Lives While Reducing Provider Costs By Joy Stephenson-Laws, Managing Partner The promise of preventative healthcare in the U.S. is unfortunately not being fully realized. When the government began promoting these programs in 1984, it promised to prevent disease. Preventative care was also supposed to reduce healthcare costs. Some thirty years later, the two leading causes of death in the U.S., heart disease and cancer, continue to claim more lives than ever with no sign of any significant decline. On reducing the cost of healthcare, while there is some debate in this area, a recent article in the New York Times makes the case that while preventative care does improve quality of life, it does not, in fact,
reduce healthcare costs for providers, payors or consumers. The CDC, however, reports that chronic diseases that may be avoidable through preventive care services account for 75 percent of the nation’s healthcare spending and lower economic output in the U.S. by upward of $260 billion a year. Reducing something as prevalent as hypertension by just five percent a year could save some $25 billion, according to the Surgeon General.
Prevention Versus Detection Preventative measures such as vaccines, low-dose aspirin therapy, weight reduction and smoking
cessation do reduce the incidence of certain diseases. But much of what the healthcare community defines as preventative medicine is better described as early detection of disease. Early detection is really an attempt to ward off the human and financial costs of chronic disease as early as possible in the disease progression. As a result, providers spend far more time, money and resources on detecting and treating disease than actually trying to prevent it. This may sometimes result in over-testing of patients, which generates additional costs without necessarily adding a corresponding improvement in patient quality-oflife or life-hours gained. And since many of these procedures are not reimbursable by private or