If We Fill Our Tires With Air We Can Save Trillions in Health Care

Seriously is that not the logic Obama is using to paper over the trillion dollar expenses of his health care plans? The heart of his idea is that if we all do a, the cost savings will allows us to pay for b. For starters preventive care will not provide money he is claiming and that has been confirmed by the CBO and for that matter the history of the human race. Grand plans from above to get everyone to act a certain way invariably fail as the the complications of life and the human race make central co-ordination, even with coercion, all but impossible. Now does this mean we shouldn't try such things? Of course not, but to use them as political cover for trillion dollar spending sprees is patently absurd, as laid out by Krauthamer who cogently illustrates the illusion:

Desperation time. What do you do? Sprinkle fairy dust on every health care plan, and present your deus ex machina: prevention.

Free mammograms and diabetes tests and checkups for all, promise Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, writing in USA Today. Prevention, they assure us, will not just make us healthier, it also "will save money."

Obama followed suit in his Tuesday New Hampshire town hall, touting prevention as amazingly dual-purpose: "It saves lives. It also saves money."

Reform proponents repeat this like a mantra. Because it seems so intuitive, it has become conventional wisdom. But like most conventional wisdom, it is wrong. Overall, preventive care increases medical costs.

This inconvenient truth comes, once again, from the CBO. In an Aug. 7 letter to Rep. Nathan Deal, CBO Director Doug Elmendorf writes: "Researchers who have examined the effects of preventive care generally find that the added costs of widespread use of preventive services tend to exceed the savings from averted illness."

But then again the Obama'a tactics have been phony in the health care debate since day one. On a side not does anything typify the fraud better then the fake doctor who asked about preventive care at a Town hall? Anyway here are the facts as laid out by the CBO:

Preventive medical care includes services such as cancer screening, cholesterol management, and vaccines. In making its estimates of the budgetary effects of expanded governmental support for such care, CBO takes into account any estimated savings to the government that would result from greater use of preventive care as well as the estimated costs of that additional care. Although different types of preventive care have different effects on spending, the evidence suggests that for most preventive services, expanded utilization leads to higher, not lower, medical spending overall.