Treatment for hypertension forestalls certain medical expens

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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 stroke 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.


OA : A
Source: — Critical Reasoning |

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by RBBmba@2014 » Mon Sep 28, 2015 5:10 am
Hi Verbal Experts,
It's a pretty straightforward WEAKEN Qs and I don't have any issues in getting this one right, but I'd like to know the EXACT reason for which option C is wrong ?

Is the following INTERPRETATION right ?

In a WEAKEN CR, we need to find a new information/FACT which would attack/contradict the ARGUMENT and thus refute the CONCLUSION. So, Option C -- economic considerations should ideally not be dominant -- is NOT really a FACT, mostly because of its construction (re USAGE of SHOULD).

Thoughts ?

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by RBBmba@2014 » Fri Jan 29, 2016 11:17 pm
@ Verbal Experts - Could you please provide a quick clarification on my above concern ?

Look forward to know your thoughts. Much thanks in advance!

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by MartyMurray » Sat Jan 30, 2016 4:41 am
The exact reason why C is not the correct answer is that it does not weaken the conclusion.

The conclusion is that there is no economic justification for preventive treatment of hypertension.

C, on the other hand, rather than supporting or weakening the conclusion that there is no justification, basically says that regardless of whether there is a justification, that justification should not be a dominant consideration.

So the argument is about one thing, whether there is any economic justification, and C is about another, whether economic justification should be a dominant consideration.

Therefore C has no bearing on the conclusion itself, and is a typical trap answer, one that seems relevant to what is going on and one that is likely similar to what's going through the mind of the test taker as he or she reads the argument, while actually it is not relevant to the particular question asked.

The use of the word should is a red flag warning that probably what C says is out of the scope of the argument. At the same time, probably you are best off going beyond noticing that red flag and more fully analyzing the logic of the situation in order to more exactly pin down what is wrong with the answer choice.
Last edited by MartyMurray on Fri Feb 05, 2016 4:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
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by abhinavgupta0187 » Fri Feb 05, 2016 1:05 am
Why option b is incorrect? Please elaborate.

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by MartyMurray » Fri Feb 05, 2016 4:47 am
abhinavgupta0187 wrote:Why option b is incorrect? Please elaborate.
The question asks which is most damaging to the conclusion.

The conclusion is that there is no economic justification for preventative treatment.

The conclusion is based on the premise that preventative treatment costs more than treating the strokes and heart disease that occur when they are not prevented.

B says essentially the following. The cost per patient of preventative treatment would not go down even if more patients were to be treated.

Therefore, B, rather than damaging the conclusion, if anything actually provides support for the conclusion, in that what B says indicates that even if preventative care were more widely used the cost of such care would still be greater than the amount saved by preventing strokes and heart disease.
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