Thursday, October 18, 2012

Checking up on Check ups

Are those "free" routine physicals over-priced? The WSJ's Shirley Wang reports that they may, in fact, be less helpful than one might believe:

"General medical checkups for healthy adults may not be as beneficial as people tend to think ... raising questions about whether spending on preventive services should be more focused on tests shown to be effective."

This doesn't mean, of course, that they're bad things, or will contribute to an early demise. But it appears that their actual effectiveness may be over-hyped.

One of the primary challenges is that we do love our "freebies," and any threats to curtail them are met with, well, certainly not enthusiasm. But the ObamaTax requires that they be covered in full, so of course there'll be a lot more of them (to the delight of Big Laboratory, one supposes).

Great.

[Hat Tip: FoIB Holly R]
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