The first level of preventative healthcare is keeping yourself fit and healthy by eating right , getting enough regular exercise, avoiding smoking, and avoiding excessive alcohol. These things are not the responsibility of a heathcare system. I support both educational spending and ‘health improvement taxes’ such as cigarette tax, and the proposed excess sugar taxes as a way to help curb supply and demand for troubling behavior.
Once you enter into ‘preventative’ things a doctor can do, you start to quickly ramp up costs with questionable efficacy. I’ll point to two facts to consider.
(a) In 2008, Lipitor is the #1 selling drug at $12.4B. How many of those people would have had a problem without the drug? Certainly not 100%, probably not even 50%. Preventative drugs is a snake oil and fear based market.
(b) One preventative body-scan study (which sadly I can’t find at the moment), found that in their sample preventative full body scans did not change mortality among a test group. They did find some disease early, but they also had patients subjected to procedures because of ‘unknowns’ on the scans which turned out to be benign. The small number of surgeries caused complications, and in the end, different people died, for different reasons, but with the same numbers. Of course this was just one small study, but many people ignore the potential negative effects of trying to detect broad disease early by checking everyone. Targetted and high-risk checks are the ones that work the best.