NEW YORK TIMES: …Here’s why: For the individual patient whose heart attack is prevented by a cholesterol screening, to give one example, that blood test is a cost-saver. But to prevent one heart attack, the health care system has to test hundreds of healthy people — and give about a hundred of them cholesterol-lowering drugs for at least five years. Added together, those prevention measures cost more than is saved on the one heart attack treatment. (My colleagues Aaron E. Carroll and Austin Frakt have written a helpful article on this concept, known in medicine as the “number needed to treat.”)
Joshua T. Cohen, the deputy director of the Center for Evaluation of Value and Risk in Health at Tufts Medical Center, said: “We’ve all heard it before: ‘An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.’ It doesn’t really play out when you analyze the numbers, and the reason for that is that you have to give a lot of people those ounces of prevention to end up with one person who’s going to get that pound of cure.”
There’s also the unavoidable fact that every time you prevent people from dying from one disease, they are likely to live longer and incur future medical expenses. The patient who benefits from the cholesterol screening may go on to develop cancer, arthritis, Alzheimer’s or some other costly illness… (more)
EDITOR: If the sole goal is to minimize costs, what we need is the Affordable Care Act until people reach 70 or 80 and then a ‘going away party’ highlighted by their taking a red hemlock pill.
Bogus logic. If you get people to eat healthier, as in remove the trans fat that the government allowed into the diet in the first place people don’t need screening and being placed on cholesterol meds in the first place.