Just how essential is the need to “invest” in primary care? Sure, the most compelling arguments favor enhancing the numbers of U.S.-trained family physicians, general internists, and pediatricians; and acknowledging preventive care as a reimbursable service would go a long way in both providing incentives to increase primary care membership and lowering the need for subsequent expensive medical services. Good reasons, indeed. But, they are qualitative ones — focused on many assumptions. Politically, these are the assumptions that proponents of some degree of a public option (short of an outright single payer) are banking on to cut overall healthcare costs.

But a new study just out shows that the future savings of such a preventive approach may not be as significant as the White House hopes in stemming the healthcare spending tide. At least in the near-term. Researchers with the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, a healthcare policy institution, used patients already diagnosed with one of the most expensive chronic diseases — diabetes — to estimate that the cost savings (spent sooner on services such as dialysis) would be recouped in 25 years, much longer than Congressional Budget Office estimates, which are usually 10 years out.

Sooner savings are a possibility but not a probability? For Democrats, savings can’t come soon enough. For Republicans, this is the sort of ammunition needed to criticize Obama’s affinity for promoting preventive medicine. | LINK

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