Maggie's Farm

You may not have read my piece this week, Preventive Medicine: Drive carefully, and make sure you have good genes. It's not the best post in the world, but it makes my point.

A propos of that topic, see Docs running to stand still in The American. A quote:

The general popularity of widespread preventive care rests on the shaky presumption that such medical services head off more serious medical conditions, save lives, and reduce healthcare costs. A lengthy literature actually challenges each of those premises; at least when recommended preventive care services are not limited to a shorter list of medical interventions and targeted to the most appropriate types of patients likely to benefit from them. But the broader political argument often is that “cost” should not be a disincentive to greater demand for such presumably necessary services, particularly when society as a whole is supposed to benefit in the long run from better population health.