When I see the prices of some of that testing, I know that that cannot be the reason, and indeed, establishing personal baselines by regular testing can only be helpful. The aversion to it grounded on taking some average patient, I am convinced.
I really wish there was more transparency, because test aversion is exactly the same protocol you'd invent if you were trying to save money. I want to be able to see which of the two we're dealing with.
Given how the Dutch system seems to be designed to maximise paper filling and busywork instead of healthcare - and of course to make the insurance companies rich - it's no surprise that they're against it.
Medical experts here have very little say in how things are run. It's all bankers and bureaucrats.
I've worked for a hospital and I've never been able to find anything approaching a complete balance sheet. Financing it utterly opaque, but I'd love to have something solid before I accuse anyone.
I'm far from an expert on this topic, more on the contrary.
The surgeons use to run the hospital. In contrast with mba's they knew things. I don't know what the difference is precisely but I hear the ziekenfonds use to have people to divide money over treatments (set prices) without their salary depending on their choices.
I don't know about the scale but longer ago we would just build hospital buildings and house a workforce of nuns nearby who had their own garden. Now we some how cant afford to put down a building and with realestate prices on the rise the salaries need to follow. We might not like the factory village concept but if you have to be on call all of the time it seems fkn convenient to me. Cut the salary and give the employees a house, seems a great perk.
Employee shortage is also costing a fortune.
We've created ambitious labor protection laws then we created a loop hole where all you have to do is pay 190% of the salary to a job agencies (uitzendbureu) and no laws apply, anything goes. If you don't like it you can go home. This didn't need to cost 90% of the salary. Unless our labor taxes are now that complicated(?) but that doesn't work as an excuse either.
Our taxes not paying for education doesn't mean we don't have to pay for it eventually (+interest)
I read they are also lacking the money to streamline the processes.
The reason this rings wrong for people is because the reasons early testing is dangerous are entirely social. People are motivated by fear to have every test available, doctors are motivated by fear of being accused of neglect by the patient, doctors are also motivated by the profit that they make from the tests, the manufacturers and patent-holders of tests are motivated to have them done as much as possible, the labs that do tests make money on the number of tests that are done, the nonprofits that campaign based on diseases are expected to message to increase testing for those diseases and accept money from manufacturers and patent-holders, there's motivation to exaggerate the danger of what's detected by the manufacturers and patent-holders of treatments for the disease, and there's motivation by researchers who formulate the criteria for determining whether a particular feature of something detected is potentially dangerous/deserves treatment, and a motivation to give them the most expensive treatment, regardless of whether that treatment is unpleasant; in fact if the treatment is dangerous, it opens up secondary markets.
There's just an enormous number of tailwinds pushing overdetection and overtreatment. The sum of that is what's important, which is that when you test earlier, you often objectively end up with more death and suffering. Which is what a state-run national healthcare systems needs to look at, they can't get lost in the trees. You pick an optimum age for testing that shifts the balance to less suffering and death (and costs), and you look for specific exceptions (genetic, lifestyle, comorbidities) and test just those people early.
Could there be a way in which all testing would help instead of hurt? Yes, but it's political and psychological and not likely to ever happen. You'd have to (as a patient) trust probability in general, and additionally you'd have to trust the probabilities that they're handing you haven't been distorted by the self-interest of others. Not likely for the foreseeable future; maybe 1000 years from now.
If you want to do the study, all you have to do is compare the number of deaths from a thing when people are tested early to the number of deaths when people are tested late. Or just look for other people who have done them. If early testing obviously saved lives, the people who sell testing would tout them everywhere. Instead, they're stuck trying to look for angles to argue that lessening death and suffering isn't the biggest consideration. They recently did this to push breast cancer screening earlier again, by arguing that if you specifically look at black American women, they benefit from early cancer screening. So overall, breast cancer deaths go up, but that's just your privilege talking. Woke conglomerates. Ignore that black people have a unique, neglected, discriminated against, and poverty-ridden situation in the US; in fact, it might even be racist to point that out (in backwards land.)
Of course, you definitely don't have to do the studies, plenty have been done. Anybody saying that they've looked and haven't found them has not looked or has seen them and is not telling the truth. Both positive and negative, about every test. The studies that support earlier and more testing are press released and marketed, though, while the others can be suppressed or simply ignored, unless some public health system or insurance company champions them, and of course they would.
However, the converse is also true: we don't actually know which protocols are there because they're social, and which are there to benefit the insurers. Both could motivate cost cutting.
I want to see the difference. I want whatever the full story is laid out in front of me.
I really wish there was more transparency, because test aversion is exactly the same protocol you'd invent if you were trying to save money. I want to be able to see which of the two we're dealing with.