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On the topic – “Does Prevention Save Money” – I agree completely with your observations. At its core it is a flawed premise and represents an essence of what is wrong with our approach to healthcare. Let’s consider - would a cultural shift in how we look at healthcare as a nation and as individuals from passive to active be a good thing? If individuals were given tools to assist them in more proactively managing their health – in collaboration with their physician – they adopted more healthy lifestyle choices, and they addressed their personal health risk factors – would that be a good thing? Would it save money at a national level – let’s get a team on this right away, let’s study it and get a task force analysis.

Market forces will ultimately resolve this issue. If the market can produce a prevention experience that consumers want and will utilize – everything else falls into place.

In the meantime – we have responded at our blog and as a letter to the editor with specific statistics that address the cost/savings implications of a proactive/preventive health approach. Our response can be found at http://www.mypreventionblog.com/

[…] finally, Scott’s post here on “Does Prevention Saves Money?” garnered this response from Brian Baum: Market forces will ultimately resolve this issue. If […]

You wrote….”Predictive models can analyze collections of data on past sickness care claims, individual attitudes and behaviors, personality factors and perceptions, as well as on worker productivity and performance, to identify the risk/reward potential of individuals with increasing accuracy. Individualized interventions aimed at multiple risk behaviors or conditions, or at preventing the emergence of such behaviors or conditions, can be generated automatically by computers, and communicated online of via mail for ten or twenty dollars a year per participant.” Do you have references or websites for such applications that exist??? Dr Wingate

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