What does the term ‘comprehensive medical care’ really mean? The very inclusion of the word ‘comprehensive’ implies something that’s all-inclusive or large in scale. There are times in the world of health care that it’s crucial to consider a patient’s entire health, looking at the so-called big picture. If this is going to be done effectively though, emphasis can’t be put on specific problems, as a broader view needs to be the perspective used. This lets a doctor take risk factors such as unhealthy lifestyle, family history, and previous medical history into account so that problems might be prevented before they even happen.

You might wonder why all of this is important. In short, the future of most health care is going to put a growing emphasis on things like prevention. Many reasons are behind this trend, but better outcomes are one of them. The majority of disease conditions are treated far more effectively when they get diagnosed earlier rather than later. In time, small issues can get more complicated and grow in size. A diagnosis delayed shrinks or even eliminates the window of opportunity for simple treatments. Bad outcomes are more likely to result which could have simply been avoided by a formal and comprehensive program of care. Cost-efficiency is another strong argument in favor of comprehensive medical care. For the most part, the health care system finds it much cheaper to prevent problems or even diagnose them in the earliest of stages as compared to letting things progress. For instance, it’s much better and affordable to prevent a stroke or a heart attack then it is to treat one.

Even though the health care system is large, individual patients should care about health care costs. The status quo system is not sustainable. Medicare is likely to go insolvent in the next decade. Many other countries have shown that preventative medicine works well and affordably, as other nations have life expectancies equal to or better than our own while spending far less per capita per patient.