Action vs. inaction

Good point - but they didn't give that as their justification. Also, you can get a better cost (in dollars and other measures) per life saved by giving women mammograms once every 2 years; and probably better still by giving them every 3 years.

and if a million dollars is the bright line, this explains why the 3x better age range of 50-60 got a pass.

Really? The cost you are quoting for the procedures sounds low for the U.S., but I'm no expert. (comment reworded for clarity)

I think it's fair to judge their bias by assuming that they made their decision based on the factors they said they made their decision on.

It says:

By the USPSTF's estimates, it takes 1,904 women in their 40s being screened for a decade to save the life of one woman whose cancer would have gone undetected. As science journalist Merrill Goozner observes, that means that it costs as much as $20 million – not counting the interventions for false-positive results – for every life saved by regular mammograms for women in their 40s.

That's 19,040 mammograms for $20m, or about $1000/mammogram. Which is wrong. Mammograms cost about $100 for the uninsured.

Even if there is no such effect, the relevant comparison is not between the cost of the plane and the value of the pilot, but between the cost of adding the ejector seat (including, of course, the effective cost of having the plane be heavier and have more moving parts) and the value of the pilot.

If you have a $100bn device that occasionally kills its users and can halve the risk by spending $1, then the fact that the device costs $100bn has nothing whatever to do with whether you should spend that $1.

I would also point out that pilots themselves are insanely expensive. Quite aside from the basics like salary and subsidization, his education (often up to a master's degree in physics or a related field), a top of the line fighter pilot has had years, if not decades of flying experience, most of which was only to train him, and every year of that costs millions for support services. You've heard that a regular grunt costs hundreds of thousands or millions for every year overseas? Imagine how much it costs when that grunt is a B-2 or F-18 pilot!

That pilots costs so much is one of the major factors behind the recent success of drones.

(Just the initial training goes into the millions; http://www.airforcetimes.com/community/opinion/airforce_editorial_pilotcuts_071217/ says >1m; even India can't train pilots for less than 4 or 500,000 USD depending on how you interpret http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/71281/LATEST%20NEWS/IAF+not+keen+on+women+fighter+pilots.html )

And maybe some pilots eject when they could try harder to save the plane instead. Has anyone checked which is correct?

Just want to point out that this should be reffering to the F-22 Raptor. The F-18 (callsign: Hornet) is significantly older and less advanced, and only costs around 30 million.

Again, there does appear to be lots of medical over-treatment so I'm not so sure your claim is true.

How about this: In health, the government sees action as inherently dangerous; while in economics, it sees inaction as inherently dangerous.

I suspect that a lot of it has to do with how much control people imagine that they have in economics vs. health.

Economics is just a lot of people making choices. This leads many to imagine that, to fix any economic problem, we just need to get everyone to make the right choices. Indeed, the "get everyone to" part is often elided, and so we imagine that "we just need to make the right choices". Thus, doing the right thing is naturally imagined as something within our power. Any economic problem can be solved; it's just a matter of will. There is therefore a bias towards action.

On the other hand, most people accept that much of their health is beyond anyone's control. They accept, for example, that no one can keep them from dying. Since they acknowledge that some bad health states cannot be solved, they fear putting themselves into such a state. On the other hand, the body usually appears to work just fine without any intervention (e.g., your heart beats without anyone consciously making it do so). There is therefore a bias against action.

I didn't follow the link. I assumed that it was robospam. Did anyone see where it led?

I think the false negative rate is wrong in that post. The original source says

The BCSC data indicate that false-positive mammography results are common in all age groups. The rate is highest among women age 40-49 years (97.8 per 1,000 women per screening round) and declines with each subsequent age decade (Table 7). The rate of false-negative mammography results is lowest among women age 40-49 years (1.0 per 1,000 women per screening round) and increases slightly with subsequent age decades.

Which suggests to me that P(negative|cancer) is not 1/1000 but 1/(actual cancer rate per thousand) which appears to be around 1/4 from the numbers in the paper. The false negative rate given here of 'up to 20%' seems much more in line with that interpretation than does the 1/1000 false negative rate.

The wording of the original report is quite misleading as it suggests the false negative rate increases with age but I think they actually mean that the number of false negatives per 1000 increases (because the cancer rate is increasing). The other link suggests that P(negative|cancer) is higher with younger women due to firmer breast tissue making it harder to distinguish a tumor from healthy tissue. Other pages I found through Google suggested the same.

Why do you think they made the right decision?

I deleted that paragraph, since it distracts more than it helps.