alt Hacker NewsThe big secret is that they could detect cancer very early in most people, but the health care companies don't want to pay for the screening. You can pay out of pocket for these procedures. I was told this by a cancer researcher
EDIT:
Adding these caveats:
1. There is a ton of nuance in the diagnosis, since most people have a small amount of cancer in their blood at all times
2. The screenings are 5-10k + follow up appointments to actually see if its real cancer
3. All in cost then could be much higher per person
4. These tests arent something that are currently produced to be used at mass scale
Replies
Probably not true. It’s much cheaper to catch cancer early than to treat advanced cancer later
Doing this could be actively worse for you and society based on the false positive rate. Testing and accidental unneeded treatment carry very real risks that could lead to net suffering and more death or damage if enough people are tested.
> The big secret is that they could detect cancer very early in most people, but the health care companies don't want to pay for the screening.
thanks for adding the caveats; they suggest that there are good reasons why it isn't clear cut that health care companies should pay.
Wrong.
The usual story is that you’re just better off not knowing because you’ll end up doing more harm than good chasing every little suspicious diagnosis. Cancer happens all the time, but many times doesn’t lead to anything.
But what could we expect as fair price if mass scale production happens ?
Health insurers would absolutely pay for the screennig if the sum spent on screening everyone was cheaper than long term cancer care.
It's the same reason they pay for annual physicals in the first place.
The not so big secret is that we can detect cancer early in a lot of people, but we also would detect a lot of not-cancer. We don't currently know the cost/benefit of that tradeoff for all these new types of screening, and therefore insurers and health systems are reluctant to pay the cost of the both screening and the subsequent workup. This is not just a financial consideration, though the financial part is a big part -- the workup for those that end up as not-cancer has non-negligible risks for the patients as well (I have had patients of mine suffer severe injury and even die from otherwise routine biopsies), and on top of that, some actual cancers may not really benefit from early discovery in the first place.
This is not to downplay the potential benefit of early cancer detection... which is huge. And in the US/UK anyway, there are ongoing large trials to try to figure some of this stuff out in the space of blood-based cancer screening, as part of the path to convincing regulatory bodies and eventual reimbursement for certain tests. As mentioned, you can currently at least get the Galleri test out of pocket (<$1k, not cheap, but not exorbitant either), as well as whole body MRIs (a bit more expensive, ~$2-5k).