DONALD TRUMP AND THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY DTACP

[mick]

part two/ reading/The Price of Zika? About $4 Million Per Child/wow

http://www.wired.com/2016/08/price-zika-4-million-per-child/?mbid=synd_digg


“We can easily say that there are certain tests these babies and children will require, like MRIs and EEGs,” says Zecavati. “But the cost of diagnostic testing will pale in comparison to cost of the long term healthcare.” Unable to walk, speak, swallow, or even breathe on their own, they’ll need wheelchairs, feeding tubes, and breathing apparatuses. And they’ll be more susceptible to pneumonia and infections, among other complications.

“A very, very conservative guess would be that the medical costs of Zika would be around $600,000 for these families,” says Jorge Alfaro-Murillo, a research scientist at Yale’s Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis.

And that doesn’t even factor in the indirect costs: the money families need to pay for special schooling, to modify their home and vehicles, and, critically, the loss of income for parents providing round-the-clock care. Alfaro-Murillo estimates the total lifetime costs, medical and indirect, will reach $4.1 million. The CDC puts the range at anywhere from $1 million to $10 million per case. “That’s a productivity loss for the country as a whole,” says Alfaro-Murillo.

For families without millions of dollars sitting under their beds, Medicaid will probably cover the majority of the medical treatments. “About 20 percent of state budgets right now go toward Medicaid,” says Gerard Anderson, a health economist at Johns Hopkins University. “If you’re adding another million dollars per child every time we have another case like this, that number probably increases in Florida and in some of the other southern states.”

But the system still provides little help for indirect costs.
And the burden of a child with Zika-related birth defects is
so high—on the medical system, on states,
on families—that the CDC is recommending flat out the government
make the “full range of contraceptive methods approved by the
Food and Drug Administration (FDA), including long-acting reversible contraception” accessible to women at risk of contracting Zika.

That makes sense. “No matter how you cut the mustard, LARC in the
form of IUDs or implants or even injectibles like Depo-Provera, are highly cost effective,” says Paul Blumenthal, an OBGYN at Stanford.

“A copper IUD costs a dollar. And even the cost of a visit is an infinitesimal fraction of what it would be able to take care of even just a Zika-risk pregnancy.” Those costs shrink away to nothing in comparison to the price of a generation of Zika-affected babies.