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Comment by caesil | Hacker News Reader

Then let's take those things into account when calculating what tests to do. Surely, though, we can do better as a society than solving this with "no preemptive testing except for extreme risks".

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There's a ton of research and regulatory oversight in this area, and the choices made generally make sense. You can safely assume that the testing recommendations are 3-5 years behind the research, though.

The US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) is the body doing that meta-analysis and writing recommendations. The recommendations are for general patients (high-risk patients should be identified and guided by their doctors), and are based on how much the screening/prevention will extend or improve patients' lives. The USPSTF explicitly does not consider monetary cost.

https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf/recomme...

We do, it's not as if we aren't doing any testing. I've been getting a yearly prostatic antigen test for several years now.

The recommendations tend to take these into account, and then you and your doctor adjust.

Sometimes politics gets into it, like with the recent changes to breast cancer recommendations, but, overall, it works well for many people.

> Surely, though, we can do better as a society

We haven't even solved the most basic shit like shelter, food, education, &c for millions of people in the west, as a society we're faaaaaaaaar from universal yearly full health checkups. As an individual feel free to get private checks, they'll gladly take your money

The fact that there are huge costs in the USA to even periodic medical checkups has severely impacted longevity in the USA to the point it ranks close to Cuba in longevity. Those with a health plan are close to the highest ranked nations. The poor without a plan at all are around ~4-5 less long lived. There is a nice rabbit hole in this data. https://www.google.com/search?q=longevity+charts&rlz=1C1CHZN...

This has a huge GDP cost in the USA, that needs to be addressed. The causes are big pharma/hospo/AMA/insuro/lobbyo.... One wonders why the AMA is there? - they limit the numbers of doctors trained in Universities/training hospitals to forestall price competition among doctors by various means. Dentists do the same.

Cost of a yearly checkup should be "taken care of", because Obamacare mandated free annual checkups, as long as you don't accidentally trigger any other billing codes while you're there. But, regardless of cost, there's a shortage of providers, so it's hard to schedule the checkup. And there's still a lot of uninsured people out there.

There is no proven health benefit to periodic medical checkups for healthy adults. At the population level it's a waste of resources. But certain preventive screening services are covered at no cost to the patient because they've been shown to be effective through high quality research studies.

https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/preventive-care-benefits...

fixed annual, I agree, but symptom/test based assessments are useful

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