Apparently our friends at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have misunderstood the details of the D recommendation about PSA screening for prostate cancer issued by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) in 2012, and are now seeking input on a proposed mechanism ““to discourage the use of PSA-based screening in the general population of men,” on the grounds that, “A lower rate on this measure indicates better performance.”

The problem is that the actual proposal goes way beyond “discouraging PSA screening” because it would actually discourage any use of the PSA test in an otherwise healthy male. Even the USPSTF never went anywhere close to such a recommendation! The recommendation as written is, at best, strange and ill-advised — even if one thinks that mass, population-wide, PSA-based screening for risk of prostate cancer is not one of the world’s greatest ideas.

Prostate Cancer International is currently…