Thus, in young people cancer presents rapidly as they develop, these screenings are expensive and unnecessary. For old/sick/unhealthy people, or people who are predisposed to certain cancers, they will probably get something else anyway, so its an expensive workup to help treat a disease that won’t actually benefit much in the long term.
I’m not against treating cancer, however let’s recognize that cancer treatment is already an expensive and resource/labor intensive process. And 10yr survival rates are not great for most cancers, we’re only slowing the burn, not stopping it. Sometimes you get lucky and die of something else before the cancer can come back, but nobody is ever “cured,” they are all just delaying the inevitable. Which, as we have seen, can sometimes be worth it (who wouldn’t want another 10 years with a loved one?), but that doesn’t mean our goal should be to find a way to “cure” cancer, it should be to find a way to better manage it, and these screenings don’t seem like they really are, or at least the use-cases for them are minimal.