Just need to know numbers. I dont know where to find it. Ive googled everywhere. A reference would be AMAZING. How much money does the US spend informing the public of ways to prevent disease and live a healthier life?
The reason you can’t find anything is that you have misunderstood the terminology. I probably won’t answer your question, but let me just clarify below.
When you hear "preventive medicine", it may sound like it’s talking about informing people of living more healthily, but don’t be misleaded. Preventive medicine actually pertains to medical malpractice. It’s talking about preventing doctors from making mistakes in their practice. When you hear that 40% of all healthcare costs go to preventive medicine, it means that for every $100 a patient pays a hospital for a treatment, $40 goes to malpractice insurance. The reason that hospitals and doctors are losing money and that so much money goes to malpractice insurance is that doctors are being sued unreasonably and abusively. Depending on how persuasive a lawyer and his/her patient client is, an obsetrician/gynecologist can be sued as much as $10 million for a miscarriage. Among that $10 million, the patient probably gets to keep less than 30% of it. Most of it goes to the greedy lawyer. True, when a physician makes a mistake, he should be held accountable, but we don’t need the lawyer making multi-million dollor profits. This is why health care costs are so high. When hospitals are being essentially robbed by medical malpractice lawyers, patients ultimately have to pay the price, and unless we have tort reform, this will not get better. Unfortunately, everybody thinks doctors are rich, and people don’t care if a doctor gets sued a couple million bucks (the average MD in the US makes about $140,000 per year. Believe me, it’s not much for how much expensive training they go through, work they do, and how much they get sued.).
Back to your question about informing the public of ways to prevent disease and lie a healthier life. This is not the responsibility of the healthcare system. In fact, it would be ineffective for the healthcare system to do this. We rely on journalism and the media for things like this. This is the job of someone like Dr. Sanjay Gupta on CNN, for example. You can’t really throw money into getting something expressed in the media.
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