Obamacare and Evidence Based Medicine
Concerning Obamacare, now re-legislated by the High Court to be a tax for the purpose of its legality, but not a tax for the purpose of the Anti-Injunction Statue under whose provisions the High Court would not have standing to hear the case, a Mr Gary writes this:
If Obamacare is fully instituted it will have one very terrible darkside that never gets talked about. The bill changes the way medicine is to be practiced in USA. The model for the new way of practice is the VA’s system which is called “evidence-based medicine” which sounds innocuous enough — what else would medicine be based on, tarot cards, ouiji boards, dowsing sticks?
Evidence based medicine is a kind of expert system that operates through a computer network controlled by a central computer. It very cookbook style. You tell the machine the patient’s complaints and your preliminary diagnosis, the machine suggests tests to narrow down the differential diagnosis to a final diagnosis that becomes the basis for therapy at least as your begin to treat the patient.
Medications are prescibed based on the idea of trying every conceivable or imaginable cheap generic medication first to see if any of them have any affect whatsoever on the illness. Only if none of them do any good does the computer begin to consider the possibility of using a first line drug that is still under patent.
The computer comes first. The patient becomes a guinea pig, and the experimental research subject” to see if any generic medications will work at all.
It’s like a big research project into cheapness in operations.
The VA is adamant about this, and so will all doctors be who must participate in Obamacare.
Obamacare is based on the idea that no medical school, and no doctor, outside of Washington DC has ANY information about the practice of medicine. The entire body of medical knowledge is concentrated exclusively in the Expert System Computer in Washington DC.
I struggled for 3 years to get Lipitor and Plavix from the VA. I took my case all the way to the House and Senate, all the way to General Shinseki. Never got a Lipitor, never got a Plavix, even though my own doctor had been prescribing those for me for 9 years previously and they were obviously working, and my blood tests proved it beyond all possible doubt.
Obamacare is going to be a VA style totalitarian fascism of absolute dictatorship in which there’s really only one doctor, and it’s a computer in Washington DC. They call it evidence based medicine.
If you can imagine something nastier than death panels, it’s gotta be a box of wires that sentences you to death.
In my own case, I went abroad to get medical care. That’s why I’m not dead. But, I’m not a follower. In a nation of followers, a lot of them are going to wind up dead if we go to Obamacare. Dead at twice the price. Poor then dead. Heckovadeal! Poor then dead. Heckovadeal!
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
