However, that’s not the point of the post. The point is that the CBO found that preventive medicine will not lower overall costs. Unfortunately, the President has positioned healthcare reform and preventive medicine as a way to cut the cost of healthcare. But, the CBO has reported that the current healthcare reform measures will increase, not decrease, costs.

“Of course, just because a preventive service adds to total spending does not mean
that it is a bad investment. Experts have concluded that a large fraction of
preventive care adds to spending but should be deemed “cost-effective,” meaning
that it provides clinical benefits that justify those added costs: Roughly 60 percent
of the preventive services examined in the review cited above have additional
costs that many in the health care community consider to be reasonable relative to
their clinical benefits. Still, providing that preventive care would represent a net
use of resources rather than a source of funding for other activities. (About
20 percent of the services reviewed have costs that are large relative to their
benefits, and a small fraction actually impair health while adding to costs.)”

http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/104xx/doc10492/08-07-Prevention.pdf

So this implies that eighty percent of preventive care adds enough in quality-adjusted-life-years (QALY) to justify the expenditure, by adding to the lifetime earning capacity of the individual.

In fact the literature review Elmendorf refers to for this information is here:

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/reprint/358/7/661.pdf

On page 2 it says:

“Some preventive measures save money, while others do not, although they may still be worthwhile because they confer substantial health benefits relative to their cost.”

Examples of those preventive measures that cost more money than they save and yet were deemed worthwhile include newborn screenings for medium-chain acyl-coenzyme A dehydrogenase deficiency ($160/QALY) (try saying that three times fast) and a high-intensity smoking-relapse prevention program, as compared with a low-intensity program ($190/QALY). So it depends how much you consider life to be worth for each additional year. (I bet that each life the newborn screening saves will end up paying much more in lifetime taxes.)