Treatment for hypertensive population

[poonamchiK]

Treatment for hypertension forestalls certain medical expenses by preventing strokes and heart disease. Yet any money so saved amounts to only one-fourth of the expenditures required to treat the hypertensive population. Therefore, there is no economic justification for preventive treatment for hypertension.

Which of the following, if true, is most damaging to the conclusion above?

(A) The many fatal strokes and heart attacks resulting from untreated hypertension cause insignificant medical expenditures but large economic losses of other sorts.

(B) The cost, per patient, of preventive treatment for hypertension would remain constant even if such treatment were instituted on a large scale.

(C) In matters of health care, economic considerations should ideally not be dominant.

(D) Effective prevention presupposes early diagnosis, and programs to ensure early diagnosis are costly.

(E) The net savings in medical resources achieved by some preventive health measures are smaller than the net losses attributable to certain other measures of this kind

I think this was a toughie to crack. Wasnt able to get this one right though i shortlisted to the last 2, which didnt include the correct choice.

OA : A.
I chose D. Shortlisted to B and D.
Pls help
P

[singh.181]

Preventive treatment is better for strokes and heart diseases.

Author says: From economic (money) stand point, Preventive treatment is not justified because money saved through preventative treatment is not much.

So, if we need to weaken author's argument, we need some extra info which will help us to show that Preventative treatment is justified.

A: We dont [color=#8000FF]directly [/color]save money from preventative treatment but we indirectly save money from other dependent places. (WEAKEN)

B. Cost of preventative treatment is constant. We are interested in knowing whether we can save any money. IRRELEVANT

D. Preventative treatment includes diagnosis, and diagnosis are expensive. Therefore, raising cost of Preventative treatment. (STRENGTHEN)

[RonPurewal]

the basic understanding of this argument is "preventive treatment doesn't save much money; therefore, it has no economic justification."

to weaken such an argument, we would need to find an economic justification (since that's the only thing in which the argument is interested), and that economic justification has to be something other than money (since the argument has already stated, as a FACT, that preventive treatment doesn't make sense in terms of money considerations).
this is exactly what is done by the correct choice (a).

choice (d) actually strengthens the argument, since it shows another reason why preventive treatment is too expensive.

choice (b) is probably best regarded as irrelevant, since it requires nontrivial assumptions. however, if that choice is going to affect the argument in any way, it will actually strengthen the argument -- since, normally, increasing the scale of any sort of program tends to make it more affordable on a per capita basis. if that's not going to happen in the case of the preventive treatment programs described in this problem, then that actually works to strengthen an argument that such programs are not economically responsible.

[archit_anand143]

Hello
I was able to boil down the argument to two sentence , also i marked the correction answer because it was easy to eliminate. But I am facing difficulty in predicting the assumption of the argument.

As the argument it says "If money is not saved by preventive care than it is not economical"

am I correct when I say that argument assumes that " Either the population of hypertension patients even after preventive care is more than normal or the cost for the cure of hypertension amounts to mammoth expense"

But the assumption i mentioned are easy to spot hence i do not think these may be the correct.

Can you pls help me with the assumption of the argument.

Regards
Archit

[tim]

you haven't really explained what two sentences your argument boils down to, but here's what you should have come up with:

preventive treatment does not save enough money in medical expenses to cover the cost of treatment

therefore there is no justification for preventive treatment

what you need to notice now is the disconnect between the premises and the conclusion. the premise talks only about saving money in medical expenses, whereas the conclusion talks about having no economic justification at all. the question that should pop into your mind is whether there is any way to justify something economically other than through medical expenses - for instance, through savings that don't arise directly from medical expenses. once you've got this in your mind, a quick scan through the answer choices shows you that A is exactly what you predicted..