Treatment, prevention: both crucial
An enhanceds CT scan of the lungs shows a tumor in pink.
Lung cancer kills about 160,000 Americans annually, so it's great that CT scans of current and former smokers have the potential to prevent 20 percent of those deaths.
Yet the discovery that scans can prevent some lung-cancer deaths does more than offer hope. It also sharply illustrates the difficulty of trying to provide decent health care to all Americans without bankrupting the country.
Technology is a leading driver of health care costs, and providing CT scans for current and former smokers will be expensive. There are signs the scans may be uncovering other diseases as well, suggesting the use of scanning may spread even further. All these scans may lead to more costly treatment, some necessary and some not.
Such preventive scanning is not usually paid for by medical insurance. But someday it probably will be, just as colonoscopies are today, making coverage ever more expensive. Some 50 million Americans already lack medical coverage, and increasing the cost won't help.
The vast majority of lung-cancer deaths, it should be noted, are due to smoking. Lung cancer, in other words, is largely self-inflicted - like many other ailments, such as some diseases associated with obesity. Of course, sufferers should be treated. But if we are ever going to control medical costs, we must improve at changing behavior as we improve at peering inside the human body. hN
