You can't be serious.
I am. Mammograms are only marginally more effective at identifying breast cancer than monthly checks done by the person by using their fingers to look for lumps, and cost much more, obviously. The same is roughly true for testicular cancer prior to about age 45. Unless there is already a family or personal history of a disease that benefits from early detection, annual checkups are probably useless between the ages of 17 and 40, maybe longer. Half of the vaccines on the recommended schedule are of questionable value, and pretty much all of the vaccines that are required to travel to certain places abroad are too dangerous to give to everyone. Most, if not all, of the preventative measure regulations in the ACA encourage over-use of medical services; which is a waste of resources, and contribute to inflation of costs for everyone. Our over litigious medical industry contributes to this as well, resulting in doctors that over-prescribe medical testing such as MRI's just to cover their own butts in the event they screw up the diagnosis and get sued, but at least when the patient still had to pay a co-pay for these services, some would say "hold on now, do I really need that?". But if they are free, why not?
Please explain in detail and cite your sources.
My problem with vaccines is that they broadly have an image that they are, as a rule, massively favorable on a risk versus reward perspective. This is not always true, but the public doesn't have enough information to make an educated decision on an individual basis, and even if we did, vaccine companies have huge marketing budgets that tend to override rational analysis of their products. Lets do a quick look at the common flu vaccine, per Wikipedia...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_efficacyVaccine efficacy is the percentage reduction of disease in a vaccinated group of people compared to an unvaccinated group, using the most favorable conditions.
Basicly, how well does a vaccine protect the group from outbreak, versus a control group.
The NEJM did a study on the A flu efficacy Influenza virus. A total of 1952 subjects were enrolled and received study vaccines in the fall of 2007. Influenza activity occurred from January through April 2008, with the circulation of influenza types:
A (H3N2) (about 90%)
B (about 9%).
Absolute efficacy against both types of influenza, as measured by isolating the virus in culture, identifying it on real-time polymerase-chain-reaction assay, or both, was 68 percent (95 percent confidence interval [CI], 46 to 81) for the inactivated vaccine and 36 percent (95 percent CI, 0 to 59) for the live attenuated vaccine. In terms of relative efficacy, there was a 50 percent (95 percent CI, 20 to 69) reduction in laboratory-confirmed influenza among subjects who received inactivated vaccine as compared with those given live attenuated vaccine. subjects were placed in a healthy adult population. The efficacy against the influenza A virus was 72 percent and for the inactivated was 29 percent with a relative efficacy of 60 percent. The influenza vaccine is not 100% efficacious in preventing disease, but it is as close to 100% safe, and much safer than the disease.
Taking this metric alone, the flu vaccine is fairly effective, and it's also about as safe a vaccine as exists. I have no problem with offering this vaccine to the public as a rule, maybe even for free since it's also pretty damn cheap. But the flu vaccine is about the best example as can be provided. Let's look at the same metric for other vaccines, and inherent health risks of the vaccine itself, if we can...
How about Whooping Cough...
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2016/01/26/whooping-cough-vaccine-ineffective.aspxIn one particular classroom in which all students had received the pertussis vaccine, 50 percent still developed whopping cough. Cases of whooping cough have been on the rise, increasing six-fold from 2000 to 2012. Some believe the increase may be due to vaccine failure.
The problem isn't that the vaccine doesn't work, it does, but the protection fades over time...
https://www.cdc.gov/pertussis/pregnant/mom/vacc-effectiveness.htmlIn the first year after getting vaccinated, whooping cough vaccines for adolescents and adults (called Tdap) protect about 7 out of 10 people who receive them. There is a decrease in effectiveness in each following year. About 3 or 4 out of 10 people are fully protected 4 years after getting Tdap.
This probably wouldn't be an issue unto itself, if the Dtap vaccine were as safe as the flu vaccine, but it's not. It's still pretty good, significant reactions don't occur often at all, but then, whooping cough is also much less likely to harm you than the flu, anyway.
I could keep going down into the "tropical" set of vaccines, such as yellow fever, but my point is that these vaccines do not all carry the same risks, nor the same rewards; and they also vary significantly in cost. They benefit from an image of high effectiveness and low risk, but that is certainly not true for all of them. There is some minority of the medical public that questions the idea that vaccines should be pushed at all, in a similar sense that the medical community no longer prescribes antibiotics like they used to. There is some question about whether some of these less hazardous diseases should be left to nature, and the vaccines pulled, due to the idea that a naturally acquired immunity is longer lasting than an induced immunity.
I, for one, don't get the flu vaccine by choice. I have had the flu twice in my life, and both times sucked; but of the number of times I've chosen to take my "free" flu vaccine, I've had a reaction to the vaccine itself every time. I would get flu like symptoms for about a day, but I ended up missing work every time I did it. Perhaps the argument can me made that I still benefit on my off years, by having fewer infected people around me. I could see that perspective. But the idea of such preventives being "free" as a rule inside any available health plan, I don't like it. Again, predictable health expenses should not be paid for by insurance.
