The health insurance company has little motivation to care about your health, but doctors have little motivation to care about money and money is actually important too. Ultimately you end up paying for all that unnecessary testing and there has to be some mechanism for controlling cost.
With that said, one time I was appealing a rejection of home care for my grandfather and I mentioned that his condition had declined and he was currently in the hospital. The guy from the insurance company said that clearly someone in a hospital doesn’t need home care and so my appeal should be rejected and I should file a new claim (which can take months) after my grandfather was home again. The arbitrator didn’t agree with that (although she said that she could postpone the hearing until he was discharged if that was what the insurance company wanted) but I was still so angry.
That study is idiotic. It’s literally an embodiment of the joke: “You could have found it faster if you looked in the last place first”.
Standardized triage testing has been shown over and over to save many more lives than doctor intuition alone. Just because a test rules out a diagnosis doesn’t make it “unnecessary”.