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Comment by reacharavindh | Hacker News Reader

May be I have been living in a bubble. I remember doing a “annual check up” in the US about 5 years ago, and that was super basic - blood pressure, sugar, cholesterol levels etc. they didn’t even do a detailed enough bloodwork to test for allergies. Definitely not looking for any disease vectors.

Now, I live in DK, and my visit to the GP would always go with my hard attempts to convince my GP that something is really wrong and I am not a crazy lunatic who is simply looking for attention. Although, I have never directly asked for a checkup(while being healthy) to look for disease vectors. I’ll ask and see what they say.

I’d prefer if this is outside of the general healthcare system though. I don’t want to occupy Doctors, and medical labs from people who are actually sick _now_ and need those tests, and attention.

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This approach actually works really well for conserving healthcare dollars. If a doctor feels like nothing is wrong, 99% of the time they’ll be right. Sucks to be that 1% where you die of a cancer that would have been caught, but that’s the trade off.

The marginal return of each dollars spent on screening goes down quickly. At a population level you can’t justify it, but at a personal level you can.

Another Danish person here, your GP would never check you in any sort of fashion here, unless you already have (serious) symptoms.

Same for me in Germany. You are eligible to one checkup when you turn 35, that's it, lol. Otherwise you have to convince the doctor a certain check is necessary. Usually doctors don't like that very much. I would even happily pay for it myself, but I still need to convince the doctor I'm not a hypochondriac.

Thats not true. The cost of the checkup are covered once before you turn 35 and every three years for anybody above the age of 35 [1]. Still, people have to be willing to do that checkup, make an appointment by themselves and so on.

Still, seeing what is and what isn't covered by public health insurance just seems so stupid. The focus on cure instead of prevention, and that not even particularly good. It's sad to see how much money goes to waste for useless treatments with something like homeopathy while people who really need proper treatment are stuck with the cheapest option that is paid for.

[1] https://www.bundesgesundheitsministerium.de/checkup.html (German)

Thanks for the correction, that was what my doctor told me. But maybe I also misunderstood him.

I don't think blood tests for allergies are a regular thing anywhere. It's generally done if you can't have the skin testing and the skin testing is something you go to a specialist for. It's not something that's screened for regularly.

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