Of course finding cancer early while it can still be operated on is VASTLY more expensive than letting people die untreated. Not only do you pay for the tests on the people that don't have it, you pay for the tests on the people that do have it, and you pay for the treatment once it is discovered.
Perhaps there is some other benefit to preventive care that makes it worth more money? How does the health of someone who has avoided a heart transplant through early detection and treatment of heart disease compare to that of someone with a heart transplant, for example? How does the lifespan compare?
WIthout putting a price on the BENEFITS of the different mix of outcomes, it is impossible to know whether the COSTS of the preventive approaches are worth it or not.
No, preventative medicine does not save money, and there were people who believed that. But it may save some lives and improve many more lives. That has to be studied (and if already studied, discussed) before preventative care is tossed as a waste of money.
No one is advocating tossing preventative care. The problem is that preventative care is treated as a monolithic entity rather than a collection of things, a small subset of which is responsible for most of the benefits.
In line with the results of the poll here, a thread for discussing politics. Incidentally, folks, I think downvoting the option you disagree with in a poll is generally considered poor form.
1.) Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
2.) Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
3.) A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate.
4.) In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.
If anybody thinks the rules should be dropped here, now that we're no longer conducting a test - I already dropped the upvoting/downvoting limits I tried, unsuccessfully, to put in - let me know. The first rule is the only one I think is strictly necessary.
Debiasing attempt: If you haven't yet read Politics is the Mindkiller, you should.