The private sector, who has a profit motive, is going to be the bastion of objectivity? Guess what. The private sector produced over 300 “scientific” papers that tried to cast doubt on the dangers of cigarette smoking. Ditto for second-hand smoke.

Right now, Congress is using the CBO to score the cost of health care reform plans. Maybe we should go to a private think tank for “objective” instead?

This is the type of answer you get from dogmatic people who can’t see any evidence that they’re little ideas are wrong, no matter how overwhelming the facts are against them.

Take to the streets with our great leader Glen Becks and take back our country. Also

While sinz54 is correct… there’s nothing wrong with a close look at the best utilization of scarce health care resources to determine what works and what doesn’t… but the right place to do that is the private sector or a think tank informing public opinion and doctors –not the govt turning short-sighted math quizs into public policy and rationing.

You reduce the argument to one of “pure math” fighting against the corrosive effects of “special interest hucksters”? What a crock! Ir reminds of the attitude that informed the debate about global warming… in the global warmerists’ mind, it was somehow science versus ignorant masses. Science must win! And now we find that science wasn’t all that scientific and mostly politically motivated.

I see your ideas as an example of a Soviet govt mindset telling –not informing– people what’s is best for the interests of the Borg… ohh, I mean best for the interests of govt… oooh, I mean best for the interests of society. Yeah, that’s the ticket behind every math geek trying to use math to answer society’s problems. It’s the people we are concerned about… yeah, if they fit on a slide ruler.

You really do have that whole “Mother Russia, Soviet” mindset down pat. Chilling –and it seems perfectly insync with the Democrats these days. Take da banks. Take da GM. Take da AIG. Take over da deficit. Give world to enemies. Do it now for Mother Russia… I mean, Mother Democrats.

Thankfully, this latest entre of the geek utilitarian component into the debate will likely help derail the Democrat’s health care “reform” plans. I know in our family the females are very angry over proposed govt cutbacks in mammograms and other health screening tests they’ve come to expect as a way to protect their life… and like with Immigration Reform, the list of opponents will grow as information spreads like a cancer through the body politic.

Thank God we haven’t yet turned over the levers of power on health care to the Democrats. Well, not this week anyway.

The problems with the breast cancer screening recommendations are threefold:

1. It represents a reversal of a 20 year mindset that “early detection saves lives.” We’ve had this propaganda campaign to get screened early. So this sudden U-turn in policy disturbs folks.

2. There’s an feminist angle here: Women had organized in their “pink ribbon” campaigns to raise consciousness about breast cancer. So now, some of them are taking these new recommendations as some kind of male chauvinist dismissal of women’s concerns. (Even though there were plenty of female scientists on the panel.) The recommendation that women shouldn’t bother with breast self-examination was taken by many women as they shouldn’t be aware of their bodies, which goes against a whole generation of feminist-tinged books like “Woman’s Body: An Owner’s Manual”. Breast cancer had become politicized, a feminist crusade, which is making rational discussion more difficult.

3. In his proposals for health care reform, Obama had made the (incorrect) claim that more intensive prevention measures can lower national health care costs. In fact, it won’t, as epidemiologists could have told him.

If you have to screen 1,300 women to find one case of breast cancer, leading to hundreds of unnecessary expensive biopsies and other tests (some of which can have fatal side effects), it frankly pays to not screen and just treat that one woman for breast cancer after she develops it. Besides, we all have to die of SOMETHING eventually. Early detection of an aggressive cancer may enable treatment to start sooner–but she may still die of the cancer despite treatment. Statistically, it looks like her life expectancy was extended with early screening; but in reality all you did was find out years in advance how and when she was going to die.