Obama has told us that preventative care instillation to millions more Americans will tamp down costs . But, pesky facts keep getting in the way. From ABC news via the CBO:

In yet more disappointing news for Democrats pushing for health care reform, Douglas W. Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, offered a skeptical view Friday of the cost savings that could result from preventive care -- an area that President Obama and congressional Democrats repeatedly had emphasized as a way health care reform would be less expensive in the long term.

And from a recent NEJM study:

"Sweeping statements about the cost-saving potential of prevention ... are overreaching. Studies have concluded that preventing illness can in some cases save money but in other cases can add to health care costs. For example, screening costs will exceed the savings from avoided treatment in cases in which only a very small fraction of the population would have become ill in the absence of preventive measures”

These findings evidently fell on deaf Obama ears; a week after the CBO report (which also cited the NEJM study) Barack kept telling us that preventative pushes will translate in to cost savings. In a NYTimes Op/ed, Mr. Obama wrote:

Most important, we will require insurance companies to cover routine checkups, preventive care and screening tests like
mammograms…There’s no reason that we shouldn’t be catching diseases like breast cancer and prostate cancer on the front end. It makes sense, it saves lives and it can also save money.

Obama has yet again decided to fudge the facts and misrepresent the issues. He is ignoring the fact that pushing millions of folks into preventative care doesn’t translate into savings and will in fact drive up costs. The addition of lower statra income folks into the heath care system will mean a whole bunch more defensive medicine from the nation’s over-worked doctors.

And it won’t necessarily translate into better health. That is the thing about medicine, it plays tricks on us. For example, there is emerging data the breast cancer is over-diagnosed and over-treated by large margins.

One Danish study found that as many as one in three breast cancers detected by mammography are over treated and would do better to go the route of watching waiting.
And another study (BMJ) finds:

Population-wide mammography screening is associated with higher incidence of breast cancer, but the estimated overdiagnosis rate is more than 50%.

This is a lot like our conundrum with prostate cancer. That is, we are aggressively treating virtually all cancers we find, even those that may not be life-threatening, those that will remain dormant or will regress naturally over time.
This is not to say women should not have mammography done at regular intervals, but it is suggestive that many women and men undergo pretty awful treatments that are unnecessary and very very costly.

Medicine has yet to figure out who, exactly, should be treated and who not—a hallmark of Personalized Medicine. But that is rapidly changing. The genetic footprint of our tumors will help led MDs in the right direction. Only trouble with that is : ObamaCare is the antithesis of personalized medicine.
ObamaCare is all about socialized One-Size Fits All medicine. (Remember the gadzillions he is spending on such one/size/for/all studies?) So what if we regress in cancer care....so long as everyone gets preventative treatment. Right? Wrong!

Heartless I am not; I do want responsible preventative care for all, and this site has repeatedly laid out how to get there without hurting the excellent care middle Americans get currently. Tax health care benefits of the working to cover the uninsured with private insurance.

Let’s reform health care in the U.S. without wrecking it for the majority and without bankrupting the entire country.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, except when that cure involves lopping off breasts and prostates that would be better left to watchful waiting.

Prevention is good, and Americans need to hear about healthy lifestyles, but….is it cost effective to pay highly trained MDs to tell us to exercise more and eat right over and over and over again???
No, that is just wasteful spending! Group classes by trained RNs and Dieticians and Physical Therapists and Occupational Therapists, etc. are just fine. Under ObamaCare Prevention Plan we will be paying MDs top dollar to say the same thing over and over and over each day.

We should pay our MDs for the time they spend diagnosing us (something we are not great at), BUT….. to pay out millions of doctor visits at top dollar to tell patients, hey no more fried chocolate butterfingers at breakfast, well, you do the math!
(P.S. Educated folks take to healthy lifestyles at far higher rates than any other group. Prevention efforts often falls flat with the uneducated, so it seems the push ought be education before procreation, something that will reduce health care cost for Certain, over time. Get women into and out of college at 80% rates and watch this nation take off!)

Obama is a pie in the sky kinda guy, but all of us are going to have to pay for his lack of reality and experience. Payment will come due in the form of national security fall downs when we are dead broke and can never dig out...and in the form of the health care that we now get being reduced to: take this blue pill and call me in the morning five weeks from now if you can get an appointment. Then perhaps a red pill, but if you need anything more, try back sometime next year. In the meantime, I've gotta jump and tell Mr. Jones for the upteenth time to stop with the pizza and beer for breakfast and the gallon of Coke for lunch and the carton of cigs for dinner. Bye bye.

UPDATE: NEW YORK (Reuters Health) -

Screening all men for prostate cancer using a currently available common blood test is not worthwhile, according to a new study.

The study suggests that doctors need better tests before they can recommend large-scale screening, study co-author Dr. Mattias Johansson told Reuters Health. "In particular, tools that help distinguish rapidly growing and potentially lethal tumors from slow growing tumors are warranted in order to minimize overdiagnosis and overtreatment."

Johansson, from the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France, and his colleagues looked at more than 500 men with prostate cancer and more than 1000 case without it with similar characteristics.

They found that prostate-specific antigen (PSA) - a common blood test used to detect the disease - could not reliably distinguish between slow-growing prostate cancers that were not likely to cause any harm, and those that were likely to become aggressive and deadly.

In an analysis accompanying the study in the BMJ, Dr. Jennifer Stark, from Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, and colleagues examined the benefits and harms of PSA screening and concluded that at present there is simply not enough data to support population-based screening.

Moreover, they note, further studies with more precise measures are needed to gauge the financial and psychological toll of false positive PSA results, overdiagnosis, and overtreatment of prostate cancer.

http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSTRE58O6IP20090925

Links:
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/08/congressional-budget-exp...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/opinion/16obama.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1...

http://femisex.com/content/prevention-vs-personalized-medicine-obama-car...