Free Preventive Health Care is a Lie

Proponents of health care reform have changed their talking points, now it is all about "Free preventive health care for all!". They tell us that preventive medicine saves money for all of us. But this is a big, fat lie.

At first take this story sounds plausible. If we can help someone avoid a heart attack, then the treatment it takes to prevent the heart attack is certainly cheaper than treating the crisis of an actual heart attack. But this is only true in individual cases. When you spread the costs out across our entire country, it ends up costing us billions more.

Here's how the math works:

Paying for Heart Attacks-

• Each year roughly 1.1 million Americans suffer a heart attack
• A heart attack will cost roughly $20,000
• Total heart attack costs for all 1.1 million patients should be roughly $22 billion

Paying to Prevent Heart Attacks-

• There are over 300 million Americans in this country
  If we granted preventive care to the 20% that are at the highest risk we would need to treat 60 million people (which may not be a big enough number for the biggest disease problem in the U.S.)
• If we could take the entire $22 billion expense of treating heart attacks and divide it by the 60 million people needing preventive treatment we would be allowed to spend $367 per person on preventive care.

What would $367 get us? Nothing of substance I'm sure, at least not with the government in charge of it. And that number assumes we stop all spending on treating actual heart attacks, which is a terrible assumption. It would be a huge deal if we could cut the number of heart attacks in half (saving 550,000 heart attacks annually). But that means we can only spend half of the $22 billion, or $184 per person, on preventive care. And this is with zero savings!

So please, let's not lie about saving money by opening up free health care to millions of people. Free health care may be a lot of things, but free isn't one of them.