Comment by kulahan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kulahan | Hacker News Reader

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I'm pretty sure every medical show had an episode where the "money-grubbing hospital admin" character want to start selling full body medical scans, and the "very well-respected and honor-bound doctor" character points out how this is quite literally one of the most useless and corrupt ways for a hospital to make money.

There are probably a dozen things wrong with your body right now. That doesn't mean they're even affecting you. While you may have some type of cancer that is at the absolute first day of detectability, or a bone slightly out of place, or a weird spot on your heart, someone else has a case that is 6 months deeper and needs more dire treatment.

There is zero benefit to society to massively overburden our healthcare system (this is true of any nation) by searching constantly for random problems that may or may not exist.

If there were good reason to do this, you'd have regularly-scheduled checkups, like with colon or breast cancer.

at the same time you have endless stories of people losing family and friends to cancer because a doctor dismissed complaints as anxiety or needing to exercise more leading to cancer not being discovered until it was too late to treat.

The answer can't be to put our collective heads in the sand.

Perhaps BOTH the "money-grubbing hospital admin" and the "very well-respected and honor-bound doctor" are wrong for not involving their patients in these decision? And their insurance for that matter.

Recently my US-system, world-ranking university hospital complex was first convinced that my insurance would not pay for XXX (and consequently did not recommend it and delayed it). Then after I insisted and got that done, they told me how surprised they were (1) that my (US) insurance did in fact cover every single bit of everything we eventually got done and (2) how MUCH that same US insurance in fact paid them for each of the bits. On the first try. That insurance company has horrible problems, but I can't complain that they didn't cover the hell out of the thing. You know - on the same year we read everyone else's horror stories.

The whole system is very sick.

You also have the issue of information creating liability. A thing that nobody knows about is nobody's problem, a thing that COULD be a problem but probably isn't in someone's professional judgement creates liability for the decision maker.

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