Obama-Care’s “death panels” recommend no screening for prostate cancer for men. The US Preventive Service Task Force ruled last week that screening for prostate cancer is a waste of money.
The task force claims that screening all adult men with the PSA (protein-specific antigen) test doesn’t prevent death from the disease. It argues that “the number of men who avoid dying of prostate cancer because of screening after 10 to 14 years is, at best, very small.â€
Adding to the “costs†of the test are “false positives†— they tell people they have cancer when they don’t about 10 percent of the time. The task force thinks this problem makes the cost of screening higher than the tiny benefit screening generates.
It’s worth analyzing the road to this conclusion, because it tells us a lot about how ObamaCare rations medicine.
First, the task force measures the effect of testing on the death rate from any disease (all-cause mortality). That’s a bogus benchmark, because, as John Maynard Keynes famously noted, in the long run we all die. In fact, death rates from prostate cancer have dropped 57 percent among men ages 49 to 64 and 80 percent among adult men over 75. National Cancer Institute data show that prostate cancers are being detected and treated earlier and that life expectancy is rising as a result.
The task force claims there is no evidence that screening directly reduces prostate cancer. But how, then, did death rates decline, if screening doesn’t work?
It does, of course. As prostate-cancer expert William Catalano notes, PSA screening is why the horror of not diagnosing this cancer until it has metastasized (advanced and spread) has all but disappeared.
Catalano also points out that it’s regular testing — not the test being used — that has likely contributed to raising the odds against the disease.
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Who needs evidence when the Obama-Care cost cutters strike? JAJ48@aol.com
