> Regardless, in Australia fewer will reach that cohort because preventive measures through universal health care are in place. That means widely available cancer screenings will catch malignant tissues before they turn cancerous.
This is an assertion that you're stating as fact, but it's directly contradicted by both the aforementioned study (it's not true that "fewer people reach that cohort") and by existing domain knowledge about how cancer screening actually works.
As explained below, screening people for cancers earlier actually doesn't improve mortality rates significantly. In fact, survival rates are actually roughly flat when adjusted for detection time, because earlier detection mostly catches cancers that wouldn't actually progress to be fatal in the first place.
> Additionally those screenings will be lower cost than the US model
You have this backwards. Screenings for early asymptomatic cancer are actually the textbook example of gratuitous costs.
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.
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.
This is an assertion that you're stating as fact, but it's directly contradicted by both the aforementioned study (it's not true that "fewer people reach that cohort") and by existing domain knowledge about how cancer screening actually works.
As explained below, screening people for cancers earlier actually doesn't improve mortality rates significantly. In fact, survival rates are actually roughly flat when adjusted for detection time, because earlier detection mostly catches cancers that wouldn't actually progress to be fatal in the first place.
> Additionally those screenings will be lower cost than the US model
You have this backwards. Screenings for early asymptomatic cancer are actually the textbook example of gratuitous costs.