One of the common memes in the health debate is the claim that increased spending on preventative medical care (e.g., cancer screening) can reduce overall health spending.

That idea is very attractive, since it seems to offer a free lunch: greater health at lower cost. It has just one small problem, though: it isn’t true.

As the Congressional Budget Office describes in an analysis released on Friday:

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.

That result may seem counterintuitive. For example, many observers point to cases in which a simple medical test, if given early enough, can reveal a condition that is treatable at a fraction of the cost of treating that same illness after it has progressed. In such cases, an ounce of prevention improves health and reduces spending—for that individual. But when analyzing the effects of preventive care on total spending for health care, it is important to recognize that doctors do not know beforehand which patients are going to develop costly illnesses. To avert one case of acute illness, it is usually necessary to provide preventive care to many patients, most of whom would not have suffered that illness anyway. Even when the unit cost of a particular preventive service is low, costs can accumulate quickly when a large number of patients are treated preventively. Judging the overall effect on medical spending requires analysts to calculate not just the savings from the relatively few individuals who would avoid more expensive treatment later, but also the costs for the many who would make greater use of preventive care.

In short, an ounce of prevention may save a pound of cure for the patients it helps. But those ounces of prevention can add up to tons of costs when spread over millions of patients.

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