posted
Every morning on NPR this week I've heard the following public service (?) announcement. "Preventive Medicine saves thousands of lives annually, yet less than 1 cent of every health care dollar is spent on preventive medicine research."
My immediate thought every time is "Yeah? . . . so?"
If you have more than 101 projects competing for the same dollar, if you wanted them all to have an equal share, could any of them have more than 1 cent per dollar?
In terms of "health care dollars", there must be hundreds of thousands of competing projects with claims on that health care dollar. Granted not all of those projects will have the same degree of legitimacy or urgency, but I bet well over 101 of them would be considered critical by millions of people. Can any one of them realistically expect to ever get MORE than 1 cent of each health care dollar spent? Even if you limited the pool to each dollar spent on health care research? (And I'm pretty sure the advert didn't specify research funds)
Can I add this to my list of facts that want to sound profound but are essentially meaningless? Right along with "50% of all high school students are below average."
quote:Currently, less than one cent of every health care dollar in the U.S. is spent on prevention research-while 40 to 50 percent of mortality in the U.S. can be attributed to preventable causes. There exist critical gaps in what we know about what works.
In order for our public health programs to be more effective and efficient investments, we need to do additional research. Extramural prevention research has been completely zeroed out in the President's budget. This is not only unwise, it undermines CDC's capacity to ensure translation of critical, basic research begin done by other federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health.
I don't know if this answers your question Karl. For one thing, the quoated passage is talking about prevention research, which might be different from preventive medicine. However, this passage does illustrate that various competing interest groups may join together to ask for a bigger piece of the pie. Apparently this CDC coalition is made up of interest groups representing various major diseases such as:
American Cancer Society American Heart Association American Lung Association American Red Cross American Urological Association Arthritis Foundation AIDS Action
I just woke up so please disregard this post if none of it makes any sense. I'm sure someone in the profession will have a much better answer.
[ March 11, 2005, 08:04 AM: Message edited by: Beren One Hand ]
Posts: 4116 | Registered: Apr 2002
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posted
Your post makes sense to me, and I might even agree that we should spend more on preventive research. What I'm quibbling with is that the issue seems to have been boiled down to a meaningless soundbite for public consumption.
I realize that there is a high demand on the average American's attention span, but don't we lose something when we condense an issue until what's left is less than a platitude?
Posts: 6394 | Registered: Dec 1999
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posted
If 50% of all high school students are below average, soundbites might be the only things they understand.
Are you especially upset because this happened on NPR, which is suppose to be a more reliable source of information compared to other commercial radio stations?
Posts: 4116 | Registered: Apr 2002
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quote: In terms of "health care dollars", there must be hundreds of thousands of competing projects with claims on that health care dollar.
I wouldn't consider preventative medicine to be just one of the hundreds of thousands. There might be tens of thousands of projects that deal with various types of preventative medicine.
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posted
But it's "one cent of every health care dollar" that's spent on "prevention research." This is comparing a research budget to everything spent to take care of everyone - operations, vaccines, preventative care, illness, cancer, heart attack, AIDS. Not the research into those things - the actual care.
Frankly, one cent seems high when viewed that way.
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