The Cost of Prevention

Well here's a counterintuitive bit of information for your: According to the Congressional Budget Office's blog (who knew they had one?) expanded preventative care raises healthcare costs, it doesn't lower them. From the blog:

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. 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 of the many who would make greater use of preventive care.

This seems like the sort of thing that can and must be fixed.