https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/upsh ... costs.html
It counters two prevailing myths, that universal coverage and perfect compliance with all preventive care recommendations both independently reduce the cost of medical care. Not true, as many of us had already guessed.
Let’s begin with emergency rooms, which many people believed would get less use after passage of the Affordable Care Act. The opposite occurred. It’s not just the A.C.A. The Oregon Medicaid Health Insurance experiment, which randomly chose some uninsured people to get Medicaid before the A.C.A. went into effect, also found that insurance led to increased use of emergency medicine. Massachusetts saw the same effect after it introduced a program to increase the number of insured residents.
Note that because the task force ignored costs of preventive care, it is likely a massive money loser. Given the nearly non-existent actual benefits of most preventive care recommendations, it's pretty clear that THIS (along with the USDA's disastrous dietary guidelines) is what needs to be reconsidered if we're ever going to rein in health care costs. There are one-shot efficiency improvements that can help temporarily, like reversing the layers of regulations put in place by the Obama administration and minimizing administrative overhead, but these will only slow the advancing tide.There’s little reason to believe that even more preventive care in general is going to save a fortune. A study published in Health Affairs in 2010 looked at 20 proven preventive services, all of them recommended by the United States Preventive Services Task Force. These included immunizations, counseling, and screening for disease. Researchers modeled what would happen if up to 90 percent of these services were used, which is much higher than we currently see.
They found that this probably would have saved about $3.7 billion in 2006. That might sound like a lot, until you realize that this was about 0.2 percent of personal health care spending that year. ... The task force doesn’t model costs in its calculations; it models effectiveness and a preponderance of benefits and harms.