Somebody call White House Office of Disinformation Management Health Care Communications Director Linda Douglass. I’ve found another group on the Internet spreading information that harms the effort to pass House Democrats’ health-care reform, this time pooh-poohing the ability of preventive care and wellness programs to reduce medical costs in the long term. Clearly, this is another unhinged, right-wing, Nazi-esque, Brooks-Brothers-clad assault, since it’s taking aim at precisely the points in the health-care forum hosted by Commissar Douglass yesterday.

The information they’re distributing:

Although different types of preventive care have different effects on spending, the evidence suggests that for most preventive services, expanded utilization leads to higher, not lower, medical spending overall.
That result may seem counterintuitive. For example, many observers point to cases in which a simple medical test, if given early enough, can reveal a condition that is treatable at a fraction of the cost of treating that same illness after it has progressed. In such cases, an ounce of prevention improves health and reduces spending—for that individual. But when analyzing the effects of preventive care on total spending for health care, it is important to recognize that doctors do not know beforehand which patients are going to develop costly illnesses. To avert one case of acute illness, it is usually necessary to provide preventive care to many patients, most of whom would not have suffered that illness anyway.

And on “wellness programs”:

. . . More generally, however, designing government policies that are effective at inducing people to be healthier is challenging. Even successful efforts might take many years to bear fruit and could involve significant costs. Moreover, many employers already support some wellness services for their employees, and new government efforts to encourage such services could end up paying for services that some individuals are already receiving — which would add to federal costs but not reduce total future spending on health care. As with preventive medicine, the net budgetary effect of government support for wellness services depends on the balance of two factors — the reduction in government spending for people who reduce their future use of medical care and the costs to the government of providing or subsidizing wellness services.

These unpatriotic malcontents are posting on the Internet under the name “the Congressional Budget Office.”