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Cancer DNA is detectable in blood years before diagnosis

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279 points bookofjoe | 3 comments | 18 Jul 25 18:39 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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siliconc0w ◴[18 Jul 25 21:16 UTC] No.44609926[source]▶
Sadly health insurance in the US is unlikely to pay for most preventative care because the followup costs of false-positives and that they are betting that down the line someone else will pick up the tab when you get sick decades later (like the government).

It's kind of why I'm favor of universal option to align financial incentives. Like given how sick the US population is, it probably makes sense to put a lot more people of GPL-1s and invest in improving their efficacy and permanence. Like nationalize-the-patent COVID-operational-warp-speed level urgency. There are over 100M Americans that are pre-diabetic, the cost of treating a diabetic is about 20k/yr. So $4 trillion in new costs, on top of the misery and human suffering.

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1. riscy ◴[18 Jul 25 21:50 UTC] No.44610202[source]▶
How do you convince those pre-diabetic people to use a GLP-1? There was quite a bit of backlash about the one-time injection COVID vaccine when it was mandated.
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2. lispisok ◴[18 Jul 25 22:28 UTC] No.44610473[source]▶
Are you expecting the government to mandate GLP-1 agonists the same way they tried to mandate the covid shot?
3. skissane ◴[18 Jul 25 23:49 UTC] No.44611129[source]▶
You don’t need to mandate it, heaps of people who are obese or overweight are eager to take it, because they are sick of being this way, worried about the long-term health risks, feel the societal sigma, etc. For many such people who currently don’t, the big reason is not that they don’t want to, it is that their insurance doesn’t cover it and they can’t afford the $$$ of paying for it uninsured-but as patents expire the price is going to come down. Other people don’t like injecting themselves, but oral formulations are becoming available

COVID was different because being a transmissible disease, there was a strong motivation to try to maximise the percent of the population immunised. With GLP-1 agonists, if you made them freely available, likely over >50% of eligible patients would take them voluntarily, which would result in massive long-term cost savings from lifestyle diseases, even considering the continued costs from the other 50% who will refuse. And insurers may even give discounts to those who take GLP-1s (if permitted by regulators)

GLP-1s are probably going to have the unintended side effect of increasing weight stigma - already obesity skews poor, once most of the well-off obese people cure their obesity with GLP-1s it is going to skew even more poor. I can foresee a cycle in which GLP-1s increase weight stigma which pushes more people into taking them which then increases weight stigma even more, which could drive up their adoption even further