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Clinical preventive services can reduce death rates

October 27, 2017

The extent of the findings came as a surprise, Farley said. "To put it in context, the best estimate I could find was that lack of health insurance causes 20,000 deaths a year. Our model suggested that improving the quality of preventive care prevents many more deaths than that," Farley said.Both Farley and J. Sanford Schwartz, M.D., from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and Wharton School in Philadelphia, cautioned that these findings are not precise, but rather estimates.

However, "the general conclusions are likely to be true," said Schwartz, also a member of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. He has no affiliation with the study.

The message here is that there is "a lot of health benefit that is unrealized in America because we don't do rather simple things that we can be doing to prevent disease or detect it at an early or treatable stage," Schwartz said.

Source: American Journal of Preventive Medicine