IELTS Task 2: Prevention is better than treatment?

Topic:

"Governments should introduce healthcare which prevents illness rather than cures it."

How far do you agree with this statement? Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

In all countries, the government always plays an important role in medical development. However, it can be seen that governments' resources are not unlimited, so their investigation in healthcare should not be wasteful. As a result, some people argue that inspite of making a great effort to cure illness, governments should focus more on introducing disease-preventing solutions. In my opinion, this statement could be partially agreed because of the following reasons.

Firstly, if people could be prevented from catching a disease, the treatment for that disease would not need using. Some illnesses can be easily prevented thanks to changing living condition or lifestyle. For example, myopia can be prevented by providing enough light for work and having a proper sitting posture. Governments can encourage this by raising public awareness. Many diseases have had useful and specific prevention such as vaccines. Treatment cost usually higher than the cost of prevention. Trying more to introduce that prevention to community helps to reduce the number of sick people, thereby reducing the cost of treatment. As a result, money can be saved. Through disease prevention, people's health can be improved in an economical and effective way, that is why governments should spend more resources developing healthcare resolutions which can prevent illness.

On the other hand, there is no way to prevent all health failures. It is difficult to find the causes as well as prevention of many diseases. If their treatments are not paid enough attention, there may be more treatment failure, more incurable diseases and more patients who might become weaker and even die due to illness. In order to gain the best achievement in medical care, governments should also invest enough to develop and introduce therapeutical cures.

To sum up, although disease prevention is an effective solution to improve public health, accessiblity of people to illness treatments is also important. Depending on each country's disease structure, epidemiological characteristics and the situation of national budget as well as other resources, its government should pay attention and make an effective attempt to introduce both illness-preventing healthcare solutions and cures in the most reasonable way.

P/S: Please give me some comments. I appreciate all comments for my essay. If possible, can you help me assess the score of this IELTS essay?

Hang, your reasons are well developed and presented well in the essay. You have managed to present both supporting arguments and examples that people can easily understand and identify with. It is obvious that you gave much thought and care to the development of this essay. I do hope that you remembered to used a timer set to 40 minutes for the writing of this essay though. What I mean is that you should be able to write a similarly polished essay within the given time frame during the actual test as well. Make sure you always have that timer on when you write these practice tests to better prepare you for exam day.

Being a direct question essay, you were given a chance to actually begin the discussion of this essay in the opening statement. Unfortunately, your chosen format for the presentation of your answer was more for an emotional / measured extent essay rather than the direct question essay. If I had written this opening paraphrase I would have worded it as follows:

There is a discussion as to whether or not governments have the responsibility of providing health assistance that blocks the development of illnesses rather than healing the people who are already sick. I agree with this statement to the extent that the government does have a responsibility to help keep their citizens healthy by making sure they have adequate healthcare to cure them when they are sick. However, a government that has preventive measures when it comes to illnesses is, in my opinion, the better option.

In a direct question essay, you need to be able to showcase your ability to paraphrase the prompt while also offering a clear response to the question that you can further develop in the upcoming 3 body paragraphs. That is what I accomplished in the above example.

Do not use the counting system of presenting your discussions if you will not follow through on it in the succeeding paragraphs. In this essay, you lost cohesiveness in your presentation because you opened the second paragraph with "firstly" then, in the next paragraph you used "on the other hand" instead of the more appropriate "Secondly." That is because you changed the topic of the next discussion to one that does not relate to the first discussion. Hence the improper transitioning of the paragraph. You don't always have to count out of compare your discussion sentences in the first paragraph. It is better to always open with a topic sentence reference for the discussion instead. That way you avoid using word fillers (e.g. firstly, on the other hand) and instead, go direct to the point of the paragraph discussion which will help you create a more coherent discussion.

You have a good concluding summary that was only marred by the lack of comma usage when you presented the series of unrelated considerations. These considerations are unrelated to one another but fall under the same discussion topic so the use of comma's should have been reflected. It should have been structured as :

... disease structure, epidemiological characteristics, the situation of the national budget, AND other resources.

Overall, I believe your essay can garner a score between 5.5 - 6 depending on the other considerations the examiner may have for your essay presentation.