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Yes there can be gratuitous screenings. Something that, I understand, happens often in the US system due to risk of law suits and patients with good insurance demanding they take every precaution possible.

But I’m quite confident that we have enough data to establish guidelines on what circumstances to screen. And health insurance coverage shouldn’t be a factor whether to screen or not.

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We do have guidelines provided by the US Preventative Services Task Force - https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf/recomme... - and other specialty organizations may have their own. All medical students in the US are expected to know all of these screening guidelines and generally learn them during their Family Medicine rotation.

Here are the cancer screening guidelines - https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf/topic_s... - You can see that many of these carry the D recommendation, meaning they should not be done because the harm outweighs the benefit of the screening. Screening only makes sense if the cost of the test is low, the test is very accurate, and the benefit of the treatment you're going to undertake after a positive screen is large.

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