The Power of Preventative Care

With each passing year, we are increasingly more frustrated by the cost of healthcare and lack of access to services. We pay more out of our pockets for less care and longer wait times. Looking back at our own personal health care experiences, and toward our health care future at this quarter century mark, it may feel like we've become bystanders waiting helplessly, while policy makers, health care providers, and insurers collectively (but self-interestedly), wrestle to better manage and rescue U.S. health care. Finding systemic solutions may realistically take years, if not decades.

Here's the good news... preventive services can be a shining light in some of our current health care insurance darkness and confusion. 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.

According to the U.S. National Institutes of Health (December 2024), "8 out of 10 deaths from 5 cancers [breast, cervical, colorectal, lung, prostate] were averted over the past 45 years due to advances in prevention and screening."


Benefits of Preventative Services

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

  • 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. For many of us, January means it's a brand-new insurance plan year. Deductibles and other cost-sharing have re-set. Using free preventive services early in our plan year to detect problems, illness, and disease, will leave us the rest of the plan year to seek additional testing, medication, other procedures, or to make lifestyle changes that may be necessary as revealed to us by preventive screening outcomes. Generally, if we wait for symptoms to develop, deductibles and other out of pocket costs we will incur expenses for diagnosis.


Preventative vs. 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:

  • 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.

  • If a diagnosis of diabetes is confirmed by preventive screening, further tests to check blood sugars and A1C glucose levels are considered diagnostic.

Common Preventative Services

Although plans may offer a broad array of preventive care, most plans typically include the following preventive services, for adults and children:


The Future of Preventative Services

Whether you have an employer health plan, Medicare, Medicaid, Children's Health Insurance (CHIP), a marketplace exchange plan, or another type of health insurance, many preventive services we have access to today are available for free because the United States Preventive Services Taskforce requires inclusion of them by most healthcare plans.

However, challenges to the current array of preventive services in the U.S. have been raised based on cost, religious, and procedural concerns. On January 10, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review a lower court case that found in favor of at least some of those challenges for numerous preventive services.

We know that millions of lives, and billions of dollars, have been saved by preventive care, especially in the last decade or so, since the Affordable Care Act was introduced and access to preventive care was expanded. As we, individually and collectively, make future decisions about preventive services, let's not forget this wisdom...

"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." -- Benjamin Franklin