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Comment by lm28469 | Hacker News Reader

> Surely, though, we can do better as a society

We haven't even solved the most basic shit like shelter, food, education, &c for millions of people in the west, as a society we're faaaaaaaaar from universal yearly full health checkups. As an individual feel free to get private checks, they'll gladly take your money

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The fact that there are huge costs in the USA to even periodic medical checkups has severely impacted longevity in the USA to the point it ranks close to Cuba in longevity. Those with a health plan are close to the highest ranked nations. The poor without a plan at all are around ~4-5 less long lived. There is a nice rabbit hole in this data. https://www.google.com/search?q=longevity+charts&rlz=1C1CHZN...

This has a huge GDP cost in the USA, that needs to be addressed. The causes are big pharma/hospo/AMA/insuro/lobbyo.... One wonders why the AMA is there? - they limit the numbers of doctors trained in Universities/training hospitals to forestall price competition among doctors by various means. Dentists do the same.

There is no proven health benefit to periodic medical checkups for healthy adults. At the population level it's a waste of resources. But certain preventive screening services are covered at no cost to the patient because they've been shown to be effective through high quality research studies.

https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/preventive-care-benefits...

fixed annual, I agree, but symptom/test based assessments are useful

Cost of a yearly checkup should be "taken care of", because Obamacare mandated free annual checkups, as long as you don't accidentally trigger any other billing codes while you're there. But, regardless of cost, there's a shortage of providers, so it's hard to schedule the checkup. And there's still a lot of uninsured people out there.

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