Experts warn yearly checkups carry risks and do not reduce mortality

Why is critical data "populist"? Why is undamaged institutional trust your goal? Are institutions inherently trustworthy, or is it that they aren't but should be presented as such? Why are you concerned with the literacy of the audience rather than the content of the article? In your mind, why is is every author's duty to present two arguments (which is not a research mandate, the article being a research summary presented in popular article format).

Anointing "experts" is not how science works.

Again, the article being equivalent to a research abstract and research being the basis for science.

We removed science from the unquestionable "expertise" of the Church many centuries ago. At which point we placed in the hands of research and its critique.

We would probably disagree as to the causes and alternatives to this oligarchic structure, but I don't want to go down that rabbit hole at the moment.

What I am saying is that when you look at the problems with the medical profession, there is more at play here than the self-interest of billionaires. You talk at high levels about the impact of inequality on overall government policy, but not everything that goes wrong with an industry is a result of government policy, let alone policies favored by the wealthy. Medical research is fraught with issues of reproducibility. Government regulations artificially restrict the supply of healthcare. Technological advancement means that many people can now live sedentary lives, and it's adversely affecting health outcomes.

  What the politics of inevitability does is that it teaches you to narrate in such 
  a way that the facts which seem to trouble the story of progress are disregarded. 
  So in the politics of inevitability, if there is huge wealth inequality as a 
  result of unbridled capitalism, we teach ourselves to say that that’s kind of a 
  necessary cost of this overall progress. We learn this dialectical way of 
  thinking by which what seems to be bad is actually good.
  And, of course, that applies to foreign affairs as well. When we look at 
  countries that are not making the quote-unquote “transition” to democracy the way  
  we expect, you know, we find excuses. We imagine that the general trend is going 
  to our direction in some deep way. And then we fail to notice, what has been the 
  case for the last 15 years or so, that the world is actually moving in a very 
  pronounced and easily observable way away from democracy.

  But the way that things are breaking now in the U.S. is that our politics of 
  inevitability, which we’ve held to in the last 25 years, basically this idea that 
  “since communism ended in 1989 there are no alternatives,” basically this idea 
  that “technology must lead to enlightenment,” this idea that “the market must lead 
  to democracy.” Those ideas have now come back to clobber us. Neither of them ever 
  had any foundation. Both of them are highly persuasive to a lot of people and 
  that’s lead to some consequences, which are very dangerous for the rule of law and 
  indeed for democracy. Believing that, for example, more market means more 
  democracy means that you don’t regulate things that you really need to regulate, 
  like offshore wealth or anonymous transactions or shell companies. And that 
  creates a world, a gray zone of capitalism where, for example, a Donald Trump can 
  begin close relationships with Russian oligarchs. If you believe that technology 
  automatically leads to progress, then you don’t watch very carefully as certain 
  kinds of social platforms lead people into a politics of “us and them” and destroy 
  a sense of common factuality. The story that you’re telling yourself the whole 
  time about how “the market or tech have to lead toward enlightenment and 
  democracy” dulls your mind to what’s actually happening until you reach the point   
  that we’ve reached now.

It is not positive government policy that is the problem but government failure to act because the government operates on behalf of money (oligarchy), not on behalf of us (democracy).

If not the government, where do you think a solution comes from?

The ER bills for the day of the accident were around $22K for X-rays and CT scans. The ambulance was $650. I had 2 broken ribs, a broken nose, and a fractured vertebrae. Bruises on every body part. A back brace was $1500. An elbow MRI was $3500. Had to have nose surgery to fix my smashed nose, for breathing, not for looks: $11K. The rest were miscellaneous doctor appts (around 25), 5 physical therapy sessions, pre-surgery blood tests and X-rays, follow-up X-rays, etc.