An article in the Archives of Internal Medicine commented on the fact that the US Preventive Task Force recommends against screening for cancer in elderly (>75 years old) adults.
Sounds more like cost cutting measures  than good medicine to me. There are many patients in their 70’s and 80’s who are in great health and should be treated no differently than younger patients.
I see many elderly patients whose lives have been saved by mammograms or colonoscopies that otherwise would have been undetected.
Here is an interesting statement from the article: “Older adults were more likely to be screened from breast, colorectal, and prostate cancer if they were better educated or if they recalled that a physician recommended the test.”
There are three things to consider:
1. Medicine is an art and NOT a science
2. It is easy to be 30 years old and deny screening than it is to be 75! (How many senior citizens ever thought they would ever be that age when they were young?)
3. Keep medical care between the patient and physician and KEEP GOVERNMENT OUT OF PRIVATE PRACTICE!

Among elderly men, 87% with the worst life expectancy and 65% with the best life expectancy experienced more burden than benefit from fecal occult blood testing. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends that colorectal cancer (CRC) screening be discontinued after age 85  (Incorrect! Don't think one can't get colon cancer after the age of 85!) and that decisions to perform screening be individualized for patients aged 75 to 85. Several other guidelines recommend against CRC screening if individual life expectancy is <10 years, but supporting evidence is mostly from short-term follow-up studies.??To assess the benefit versus burden of fecal occult blood test (FOBT) screening in the elderly, researchers conducted a 7-year longitudinal study involving 212 patients (age range, 70–84; 99.5% men) who received positive FOBT results at four Veterans Affairs medical centers. Net benefit was defined as detection of CRC or "significant adenoma" (adenoma ≥1 cm, 3 or more adenomas, or an adenoma with villous features), followed by treatment and survival for ≥5 years. Net burden encompassed false-positive tests, deaths within 5 years of FOBT screening, and undetected cancers when patients declined follow-up. Researchers analyzed benefit status by life expectancy, which they classified as follows, using the Charlson-Deyo comorbidity index (CCI) as a measure of comorbidity: