WonkBlog:
The White House says Obamacare will be working by Sunday. Here’s what that means.
Paul Krugman:
Much of the Beltway establishment scoffed at the promise of cost savings. The prevalent attitude in Washington is that reform isn’t real unless the little people suffer; serious savings are supposed to come from things like raising the Medicare age (which the Congressional Budget Office recently concluded would, in fact, hardly save any money) and throwing millions of Americans off Medicaid. True, a 2011 letter signed by hundreds of health and labor economists pointed out that “the Affordable Care Act contains essentially every cost-containment provision policy analysts have considered effective in reducing the rate of medical spending.” But such expert views were largely ignored.
So, how’s it going? The health exchanges are off to a famously rocky start, but many, though by no means all, of the cost-control measures have already kicked in. Has the curve been bent?
The answer, amazingly, is yes. In fact, the slowdown in health costs has been dramatic.
Tim Egan:
When the first attempt by the United States to launch a satellite into orbit, in 1957, ended in disaster, did Democrats start to cheer, and unify to stop a space program in its infancy? Or, when Medicare got off to a confusing start, did Republicans of the mid-1960s wrap their entire political future around a campaign to deny government-run health care to the elderly?
Of course not. But for the entirety of the Obama era, Republicans have consistently been cheerleaders for failure. They rooted for the economic recovery to sputter, for gas prices to spike, the job market to crater, the rescue of the American automobile industry to fall apart.
I get it. This organized schadenfreude goes back to the dawn of Obama’s presidency, when Rush Limbaugh, later joined by Senator Mitch McConnell, said their No. 1 goal was for the president to fail. A CNN poll in 2010 found 61 percent of Republicans hoping Obama would fail (versus only 27 percent among all Americans).
Wish granted, mission accomplished. Obama has failed -- that is, if you judge by his tanking poll numbers. But does this collapse in approval have to mean that the last best chance for expanding health care for millions of Americans must fail as well?
The "President as failure" is a rhetorical device here, but it's all too assumed by journalists, and pushed by GOP flacks.
More politics and policy below the fold.
Brian Beutler:
If you’ve been following the ongoing Healthcare.gov tragicomedy for the past two months, you’ve probably seen at least one person suggest that Nov. 30 (this Saturday!) is Obamacare’s D-Day, or that this will be the most important weekend in the law’s history, or something similarly melodramatic.
Suffice it to say, that’s a bit overblown. But it actually is a pretty important weekend for the Affordable Care Act, even if the law isn’t exactly facing a pass-or-fail proposition. So here are a few things to keep in mind as you attempt to wade through all the histrionics that you’re bound to encounter if you’re not unplugging until Monday.
Steve Lohr (NY Times):
Vaccination programs for children have prevented more than 100 million cases of serious contagious disease in the United States since 1924, according to a new study published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
And what's just as interesting:
The disease data is on the project’s website, available for use by other researchers, students, the news media and members of the public who may be curious about the outbreak and spread of a particular disease. Much of the data is searchable by disease, year and location. The project was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation...
The open-access model for the project at Pittsburgh is increasingly the pattern with government data. The United States government has opened up thousands of data sets to the public.
Get your flu shot.
Helen Branswell:
"We have definitive proof that it's MERS coronavirus," Koopmans said in an interview from the Netherlands on Thursday.
The viral fragments were isolated from nose swabs taken from the camels, Koopmans said.
But finding infected camels and infected people on the same farm does not prove that the former transmitted the virus to the latter, she said.
It is theoretically possible that the camels contracted the virus from the people — two men, both of whom survived their brush with MERS. Or some other animal or animals on the farm may have played a role in the transmission dynamic.
"How they (the camels) got it and what the relationship (to humans) is, that still remains open, I think," said Koopmans, who is chief of virology for the National Institute of Public Health for the Netherlands.
They (the camels) smell, they spit, they bite, and now this.
thestar.com:
A controversial French study purportedly linking genetically modified foods to tumours and organ failure in rats — research widely hailed by anti-GM activists and fiercely denounced by scientists — has been retracted.
Science publisher Elsevier announced Thursday that its journal, Food and Chemical Toxicity, was pulling the paper after lengthy review of the raw data. Because of problems with the type and number of animals used, they said, the study was inconclusive and does “not reach the threshold of publication.”
Jason Karlawish (NY Times):
These guidelines recommend that doctors no longer use a patient’s LDL cholesterol level to decide whether to prescribe a cholesterol-lowering statin, and instead rely on the results of a web-based “risk calculator” — the Omnibus Risk Estimator — that determines a person’s chances of suffering atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease in 10 years.
Into the Omnibus Risk Estimator you enter nine variables, including age, sex, total cholesterol and systolic blood pressure, and the estimator returns your 10-year and lifetime risks of stroke, heart attack or death from cardiovascular disease. With these data, you and your doctor decide whether to invest in a lifetime of daily therapy with a statin pill.
This is a revolutionary shift. Once upon a time, medicine was a discipline based on the nuanced diagnosis and treatment of sick patients. Now, Big Data, networked computers and a culture obsessed with knowing its numbers have moved medicine from the bedside to the desktop (or laptop). The art of medicine is becoming the science of an insurance actuary.
It is also becoming big business.
