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> We don't have the money, technicians, or machines to run an MRI on everyone who shows up to the doctor with a problem that has a 1/50,000 chance of being canc

> We don't have the money, technicians, or machines to run an MRI on everyone who shows up to the doctor with a problem that has a 1/50,000 chance of being cancer. A guy launched a car into space; I think we have all this stuff but we — as a society — just don’t find the business case for “poor people being alive” very compelling.

snailmailstare 2y ago
There was a period where doctors would run every test on the list.. They stopped this because even if everything were free, each test has a false positive rate with a psychological cost to the patient. If anything the US has a problem with not accepting that everyone is going to die and asking them to go on to a road makes this more likely, (thus costing more than the value of the appointment.)
- singleshot_ 2y ago
  Being told that a doctor won’t do a test because it’s not worth it has a psychological cost that is higher than being told that the screening test came back positive and they need to run some more tests. You are incorrectly calculating the “value of the appointment” from precisely the wrong viewpoint. Remember that healthcare is about the patient’s health, not the bill.
  - nradov 2y ago
    No, you're missing the point. Over treatment is a serious problem in healthcare. There is always some risk of iatrogenic harm, and for many tests the risks outweigh the benefits. Many tests don't even have a simple positive or negative result: often the outcome is inconclusive. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/price-we-pay-9781635575910/ https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/price-we-pay-9781635575910/
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try_the_bass 2y ago
This is such a wild non-sequitur! A single person doing a single wildly expensive thing is not comparable to hundreds of thousands or millions of people doing a far less expensive thing. The orders of magnitude don't cancel out; the 5-6 orders of magnitude in number of "people doing expensive thing" outweighs the 3-4 orders of magnitude difference between the costs of the things you are comparing. It's also just so wildly irrelevant to the topic at hand

snailmailstare 2y ago

There was a period where doctors would run every test on the list.. They stopped this because even if everything were free, each test has a false positive rate with a psychological cost to the patient. If anything the US has a problem with not accepting that everyone is going to die and asking them to go on to a road makes this more likely, (thus costing more than the value of the appointment.)

singleshot_ 2y ago
Being told that a doctor won’t do a test because it’s not worth it has a psychological cost that is higher than being told that the screening test came back positive and they need to run some more tests. You are incorrectly calculating the “value of the appointment” from precisely the wrong viewpoint. Remember that healthcare is about the patient’s health, not the bill.
- nradov 2y ago
  No, you're missing the point. Over treatment is a serious problem in healthcare. There is always some risk of iatrogenic harm, and for many tests the risks outweigh the benefits. Many tests don't even have a simple positive or negative result: often the outcome is inconclusive. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/price-we-pay-9781635575910/ https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/price-we-pay-9781635575910/
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try_the_bass 2y ago

This is such a wild non-sequitur! A single person doing a single wildly expensive thing is not comparable to hundreds of thousands or millions of people doing a far less expensive thing. The orders of magnitude don't cancel out; the 5-6 orders of magnitude in number of "people doing expensive thing" outweighs the 3-4 orders of magnitude difference between the costs of the things you are comparing. It's also just so wildly irrelevant to the topic at hand