There was a period where doctors would run every test on the list.. They stopped this because even if everything were free, each test has a false positive rate with a psychological cost to the patient. If anything the US has a problem with not accepting that everyone is going to die and asking them to go on to a road makes this more likely, (thus costing more than the value of the appointment.)

Being told that a doctor won’t do a test because it’s not worth it has a psychological cost that is higher than being told that the screening test came back positive and they need to run some more tests.

You are incorrectly calculating the “value of the appointment” from precisely the wrong viewpoint. Remember that healthcare is about the patient’s health, not the bill.

No, you're missing the point. Over treatment is a serious problem in healthcare. There is always some risk of iatrogenic harm, and for many tests the risks outweigh the benefits. Many tests don't even have a simple positive or negative result: often the outcome is inconclusive.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/price-we-pay-9781635575910/

This is such a wild non-sequitur! A single person doing a single wildly expensive thing is not comparable to hundreds of thousands or millions of people doing a far less expensive thing. The orders of magnitude don't cancel out; the 5-6 orders of magnitude in number of "people doing expensive thing" outweighs the 3-4 orders of magnitude difference between the costs of the things you are comparing.

It's also just so wildly irrelevant to the topic at hand