Flutterby™! : Cost savings through preventative medicine

Cost savings associated with improving appropriate and reducing inappropriate preventive care: cost-consequences analysis, Hogg, Baskerville & Lemelin. In southern Ontario, with 90,283 patients:

The total cost of the intervention over 12 months was $238,388 and the cost of increasing the delivery of appropriate care was $192,912 for a total cost of $431,300. The savings from reduction in inappropriate testing were $148,568 and from avoiding treatment costs as a result of appropriate testing were $455,464 for a total savings of $604,032. On a yearly basis the net cost saving to the government is $191,733 per year (2003 $Can) equating to $3,687 per physician or $63,911 per facilitator, an estimated return on intervention investment and delivery of appropriate preventive care of 40%.

Via a comment on JWZ: Blimpocalypse Continues. Terror Blimps: STAND DOWN., which pointed out that:

So how about this: converting to single payer health care in the US would save enough (e.g., by catching cancers at early outpatient-treatable stages instead of in emergency rooms at later stages requiring expensive treatment and long-term hospitalization) to extract all 10 petagrams of carbon output from seawater at $50/tonne?

(that last link is PDF)