[hedora]

This article uses extremely contorted logic. Pretty much all health care has some cost, and hopefully some benefit in terms of life expectancy and/or quality-of-life-adjusted life expectancy.

If you assume all the costs are fungible, then the analysis is straightforward (the costs are not actually fungible -- some things cost money, other things cost patient time, or use resources that are in finite supply -- so it turns into a linear programming problem, and we've been able to solve those since before computers existed).

With fungible costs, for each of the available health care services, you the expected increase of life expectancy and divide it by the cost, and prioritize the things that have the highest benefit/cost ratio.

The article doesn't talk at all about the cost of the screens, which is fairly low (vs. spending time exercising, or a year of exotic chemo). It also doesn't look at patient quality of life.