Cost Of Prevention Essay

The role of prevention is essential to reducing cost of medical treatment. Through the three levels of prevention primary, secondary and tertiary, the difference in roles of prevention and treatment are clear. The general population may migrate through all levels simply with education and access. In the primary level “averting disease” completely through primary prevention (Williams & Torrens, 2008, p. 143). In the secondary level prevention can “halts the progression of disease” from both individuals and specific populations and at the tertiary prevention level “the future risk of worsening disease is reduced” (p. 143). Because these levels of prevention, with early intervention, can reduce or even eliminate the need for medical treatment for populations the role of prevention is very important.

The treatment method exponentially increases because the cost of one person’s treatment vs the cost for educating a specific population of people at once is substantially greater. The role of prevention serves the greater good “through primary care and population-based services” (Gostin, Jacobson, Record & Hardcastle, 2011, p. 1781). For example, the cost of a class on the hazards of smoking in a junior high school as a part of the curriculum is substantially less than the cost of treating the same number of patients individually for lung cancer.
One key issue is that physicians providing treatment do not want to spend their billable hours teaching prevention to their individual patients. The prevention approach fundamentally hampers private practices which are built for diagnosing and treatment. When prevention is introduced to teach methods and strategies to avert sickness undermines physicians’ historic basic business of fee for service. Another issue is that access to those clinicians may not be readily available which could further discourage health promotion and