Question

what emphasizes preventive medical care

Answer 1

The idea is that little problems turn into big problems down the road if they are not dealt with early on. For example, doing homework. If you procrastinate a little bit, you'll have some homework piling up. Not too big a problem that you can't handle yet. However, if you start falling behind by alot, you will now have more homework than you have time and as a result will sustain negative costs.

For example, with less time available to divide between each piece of homework, you will have to reduce quality of some assignments, you will endure a cost in the form of "stress" and inefficiency, and will get a lower mark than you would have otherwise gotten had you done the homework early.

Preventative medical care in this case would be the equivalent of doing the homework on time so that they don't have huge costs down the road. The costs down the road are larger than the costs in the present time period.

What emphasizes preventative medical care is that if you can discover diseases when they are still in their early formative stages, it will be possibly cheaper and/or easier to treat them then it would otherwise be if you left them to develop into a full blown disease.

Just another quick example to drive the point home - AIDS education. If you educate people on the effects of AIDS and how to prevent it's spread through the use of contraceptives, then you can prevent people from ever getting AIDS in the first place. Your cost of preventative measures was the cost of educating people and the cost of the contraceptives. But now consider that the costs of AIDS would be a person who now needs consistent medical care, anti virals to keep virus counts low, and most likely reduced lifespan and quality of life the victim. That victim will now likely be a less productive worker and will manifest itself in costs to the company they work for.