When you visit your doctor or local hospital for treatment of an
illness, you can expect to receive a bill or notice from your insurance
company about coverage. That’s a given. When you take steps to prevent
an illness, the cost is not as easy to calculate. However, the
tremendous return on investment can be measured in more ways than one.
In Mississippi, heart disease is the leading cause of death, accounting for approximately 31 percent of the state’s deaths. More than 60 percent of adults are reported to be overweight or obese, many suffering from high blood pressure and high cholesterol. Efforts to reduce and control such risk factors for cardiovascular disease are under way, with the goal of making primary prevention the catalyst for change.
The Mississippi State Department of Health, in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, launched the Mississippi Cardiovascular Health Program to, among other things, develop a comprehensive state plan for heart disease and stroke prevention. Its emphasis is on developing heart-healthy policies, changing physical and social environments and eliminating disparities. Other community education programs also are impacting disparities and rates for hypertension and diabetes among local residents with successful outcomes.
Despite such interventions, one of the more callous and disturbing theories making the rounds these days is that prevention is expensive and it’s often cheaper to let people get sick, or even die. When did human beings become disposable consumer appliances? When did we lose sight of the tremendous return on investment that prevention brings? Thinking of health care policy only in the context of profits and loss and short-term budget gains leads to bad thinking and misguided health policy.
Beyond the value that we place on good health, preventive health services should be evaluated on their ability to both reduce costs and vastly improve our health and well-being. Prevention – including childhood vaccines, breast cancer screening and blood pressure control – keeps us healthy by catching illnesses early and limiting their often devastating and deadly effects.
Many preventive services, such as taking an aspirin a day to prevent heart disease, do save money when compared to the costs of treating disease. Admittedly, others may not produce the same level of short-term savings, but measuring prevention’s value based solely on easily-identified savings is extremely short sighted – and misleading.
These bottom-line measures do not capture the enormous economic benefits that preventive services can generate, such as increasing the productive working lifespan of individuals. A healthier workforce translates into greater productivity, additional GDP and tax revenues. And these dollars-and-cents benefits pale in comparison to the value of improving our quality of life.
A recent Partnership for Prevention study found that by boosting the use of five preventive services (aspirin-a-day, smoking cessation, colorectal cancer screening, mammograms and influenza immunizations) to 90 percent of the target population, more than 110,000 lives could be saved each year.
With such obvious benefits, policymakers must do all they can to assure that preventive services are more widely used as they debate one of the most important issues to confront our nation in a generation – the shape and form of our nation’s health care system. Many questions have yet to be answered, but we can only hope details will be forthcoming at the Sept. 24 health care reform policy discussion sponsored by the American Heart Association to coincide with the presidential debate at the University of Mississippi.
Certainly, there will be sharp differences of opinion on how to fundamentally tackle such a complex issue. That is to be expected; however, we hope that there can be consensus on one critical point – the importance of prevention to the long-term physical and fiscal health of our nation.
Prevention is an investment we can count on. It’s an investment we must choose to afford. It’s an investment we must make.
Dr. Daniel Jones is immediate past president of the American Heart Association and vice chancellor for health affairs and dean of the School of Medicine at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.