alt Hacker NewsSadly health insurance in the US is unlikely to pay for most preventative care because the followup costs of false-positives and that they are betting that down the line someone else will pick up the tab when you get sick decades later (like the government).
It's kind of why I'm favor of universal option to align financial incentives. Like given how sick the US population is, it probably makes sense to put a lot more people of GPL-1s and invest in improving their efficacy and permanence. Like nationalize-the-patent COVID-operational-warp-speed level urgency. There are over 100M Americans that are pre-diabetic, the cost of treating a diabetic is about 20k/yr. So $4 trillion in new costs, on top of the misery and human suffering.
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It is sad that prevention is not something the US considers very important.
US private healthcare insurance is required to pay for “medically necessary” treatments and generally does pay for medicine where they are unlikely to see the benefits (see statins).
How do you convince those pre-diabetic people to use a GLP-1? There was quite a bit of backlash about the one-time injection COVID vaccine when it was mandated.
I wonder how much of that is directly tied to corn subsidies.
I have a friend nearing mid-60s. Retired military so now covered by Medicare, then Tri-Care. Having prostate issues. PSA went from 12 to 19. Desperate to get a PET scan to determine his is benign BPH, or cancer. Cannot get his scan approved since both insurances will not approve a PET as an early diagnostic tool (scan is about $7500). Cannot imagine what will happen if everyone getting a cancer DNA signal of this type tries to get clarification via additional tests. USA health care really does not work that way. HTH, RF