Eight out of 10 deaths from five cancers [breast, cervical, colorectal, lung, prostate] were averted over the past 45 years due to advances in prevention and screening – U.S. National Institutes of Health, December 2024
Preventive services can be a shining light in health insurance access and affordability. As recently re-affirmed by the US Supreme Court, if you have coverage (almost 95% of us in Connecticut do), you can probably get free preventive services, with no deductible or other out of pocket expenses. Some insurers even encourage use of preventive services by giving their members incentives or rewards to catch conditions early and avoid higher costs.
Preventive services are intended to:
• Provide routine care that help us remember, organize, and maintain health goals,
• Allow early detection of medical problems, illness, and disease,
• Stop underlying problems from spreading or becoming more serious,
• Better manage any pre-existing conditions,
• Give us more control of care options and provide us with greater peace of mind, and
• Reduce future expenses.
Using preventive services can be especially important if you have a family history of a health issue – to monitor it, lower your risk for more serious issues, and allow earlier treatment to be more effective.
Free preventive services may detect problems, illness, and disease, giving us information needed to seek additional testing, medication, other procedures, or to make lifestyle changes revealed to us by preventive screenings. Generally, if we wait for symptoms to develop, deductibles and other out of pocket costs we will incur expenses for diagnosis.
The difference between preventive services and diagnostic services
- Prevention (usually free) helps us detect diseases or conditions before symptoms develop whereas diagnostic tests are used to learn more about a condition once signs and symptoms are present (deductibles and other out of pocket costs may apply).
- Example:
o A free preventive screening blood test may be done to determine if someone has diabetes, even though they may not be exhibiting signs of diabetes.
o If a diagnosis of diabetes is confirmed by preventive screening, further tests to check blood sugars and A1C glucose levels are considered diagnostic.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure – Benjamin Franklin