Can't answer the specifics of your question, as (shock
horror!) I am not an American, and am not familiar with your
health care system and insurance schemes.
As a general principle, a test which is a sensitive screening
tool, for early changes associated with developing problems,
is a good thing for private health insurance companies, especially
if it's for a common disease. Early degenerative changes can alert
the patient and/or physician to start a treatment regime and to
make positive lifestyle changes before the onset of significant
disease. From the Insurer's point of view, it's better to spend
10's of millions preventing heart disease, than billions on
treating advanced cases which require expensive medication,
surgery and/or long term hospitalization.
Heart disease kills about 50% of us in the western world, with
another several percent thrown in for other vascular problems
(strokes, pulmonary emboli, renal hypertension/failure etc.).
It's economically viable and preferable to prevent or delay
heart disease in 1/2 the population than to allow the disease
to progress unchecked, and the costs of screening 100% of the
population would pay for itself many times over.
This wouldn't be true in cases of screening for rare diseases
that have little economic impact on the community, unless the
screening tool is very cheap (e.g. Mantou [SP?] test for
Tuberculosis, newborn infant heel stick test for PKU)
But here, we're talking about CT scan procedures which cost
a couple of hundred, up to several hundred dollars each. I
think though, that the high percentage of positive results and the
preventative medicine that could be practiced would favour
mass population screening using these techniques and I would
imagine that your health insurance companies could be convinced
to support such a programme, if not for humanitarian reasons,
at least for the hard, cold, bottom line savings that would be
made long term.
Hope that's somewhat useful.
Durro
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