Insurers Unsolicited Cologuard: When Profit Prescribes
The Hill reports on insurers mailing unsolicited Cologuard tests, framing it as an 'unnecessary' and 'terrible idea.' And yes, receiving medical tests without consent is questionable. But this isn't an anomaly; it's a feature of a system where patient autonomy is consistently secondary to quarterly earnings. Precision Bioscience, parent company of Exact Sciences (Cologuard developers), saw Q1 2024
revenue Jump 5.7% year-over-year, largely driven by screening, according to their own investor relations. We’re discussing a symptom, not the disease. While politicians fret over mail-order medical devices, they champion for-profit healthcare models that necessitate such aggressive sales tactics. The same policy makers who took millions from pharmaceutical and insurance lobbies — a staggering
$380,000 per day in 2021, according to Forbes — are now 'concerned.' One might wonder if their outrage is about patient care, or simply about how this particular profit-extraction method became too visible. How many bills designed to protect patient privacy or lower drug costs get buried while we debate the optics of unsolicited colon cancer screenings?