Is This a Waste?

A new ballpark estimate for the cost of universal (crappy) health care is over $1.5 trillion. Obama Claus refuses to discuss this, since it "depends on details to be worked out by Congress" (well, could you give us a guess, maybe within a couple hundred million at least?). 

but it's not enough to pay for health care. They have to come up with new rules for health care. Quoth Sen. Judd Gregg: "We shouldn't just be throwing more money on top of the current system, because the current system is so wasteful." This is in reference to the fact that a third of all health care costs go to testing and procedures, rather than prevention and treatment.

Hang on: aren't tests and procedures what doctors use to figure out what kind of prevention and treatment to use? Aren't tests a form of prevention? Or is everyone who gets a cancer screen just being "wasteful"? Dr. House may be able to diagnose based on hunches, and it makes for an awesome TV drama to keep saying, "Start treatment. If I'm right, he gets better. If I'm wrong, he dies." But I don't want real doctors doing that. I like my tests and procedures before they start shoving drugs in my body (or cutting out pieces of it). That's not "wasteful," Senator Gregg.