When looking at this chart, it's almost certain that we complain public health to be such a small piece. For sure we want to enlarge this part, but how? Where should we take money from? Shall we redivide this pie to make public health larger or allocate additional investment only on public health? I think both would be hard.
Within the national health expenditure, we can see clearly that most of the spending goes to medical care and services. Retreating money from these parts seems unwise unless efficiency and technology is improved to lower the basic cost of services.
So what about drawing money from other sections of federal budget? Perhaps we could take a little bit from defense....
From the aspect of investment, prevention spending differs from others that it has no instant return. It's a long-term process. I guess that's why it is difficult to shift money to prevention since there're so much spending on immediate needs and we can't just cut their costs. Like if I say we could save $5 in medical care spending after 10 years in the future when only $1 is spent in prevention now, where does that additional $1 come from in the next 9 years? Are policy makers willing to spend that $1?
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