A 3-minute read on why the preventive visit that feels skippable is actually the cheaper of the two bills, and why that only becomes obvious after the more expensive one arrives.
An oil change costs around sixty dollars and takes twenty minutes, and skipping it once rarely breaks anything. Skip it for three years running and the bill that eventually arrives is a new engine, not an oil pan, often many times the cost of every oil change that was avoided. A yearly physical runs the same math with better odds in its favor: the visit itself is often covered close to fully, while whatever it would have caught early, left unchecked for three years, tends to become a bill that dwarfs every missed co-pay.
Both decisions get skipped the same way. Nothing goes wrong the week the oil change gets pushed back, so the reminder gets dismissed instead of booked. Nothing goes wrong the week the physical gets skipped either, no symptom pointing at the exam room as the thing that should have happened. The absence of an immediate consequence is what makes both choices feel free, right up until they aren’t.
The physical is the better bet of the two because the asymmetry runs in its favor. An oil change mainly protects an engine from its own ordinary wear. A physical catches problems that are, in most cases, cheaper and easier to handle early than late. That gap between an early catch and a late one is the actual price of the appointment that keeps getting pushed to next year.
P.S. Tomorrow: why a rewards credit card and a free gym membership are both priced by how they change your behavior, not by what they cost upfront.
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