USA TODAY During the height of the pandemic, many health care providers were forced to temporarily halt elective procedures in an attempt to slow down virus transmission and relieve hospitals overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients. But before the pandemic, a new report shows U.S. hospitals may have unnecessarily performed too many elective procedures and tests, particularly among older adults. The Lown Institute, a health care think tank, found more than a million tests and procedures performed in hospitals on Medicare patients from 2016-2018 met established criteria for overuse. “These results are if anything the low end of the estimate,” said Dr. Vikas Saini, president of the Lown Institute. “It speaks to the power of habit, weak penetration of actual science and certainly a lot of prominent financial incentives for hospitals and doctors without any counter-balancing information that patients could use to push back.”