A FOX Guarding The Big Dog's House

FOX And Friends does love to scare the hell out of people, and devoted time today to the lovely lie that under Obamacare, people wouldn't get the heart stent procedure that President Clinton got yesterday because under Horrible Socialist Health Care, government bureaucrats would decide that saving your heart was too expensive and let you get a bandaid and a punch to the ventricle to try to unclog your valves or something.

Conservatives have long used comparative effectiveness research (CER) to further their claim that health care reform would ration treatments based on cost, impose a one-size-fits-all standard for medicine, and keep doctors from prescribing more expensive and effective procedures. But this line of thinking misunderstands the purpose of CER and ignores legislative language that specifically prohibits the government from applying research findings to coverage decisions. CER is a recommendation, not a mandate. (See pg. 1652 of the Senate bill or pg. 769 of the House bill).

Rather than making arbitrary decisions based on cost, CER — which compares clinical outcomes of alternative therapies used to manage the same condition — would provide doctors with unbiased information about the most effective treatments, help doctors and patients make better informed decisions, and improve the quality of care. Properly conducted CER will actually promote faster adoption of personalized care, not one-size-fits all medicine.

As Alan Garber of Stanford and Sean Tunis of the Center for Medical Technology Policy point out, “far from impeding personalized medicine, CER offers a way to hasten the discovery of the best approaches to personalization, providing more and better information with which to craft a management strategy for each individual patient.”

Indeed, CER could have actually improved treatment for heart disease by exposing harmful procedures and informing health care providers about best practices. The course of treatment, however, will always be left to the patient and their doctor. 

But no, FOX will lie about it and try to scare Americans instead of telling the truth about the health care bill.  the reason why people don't like the bill is because for the last year, FOX has been flat out lying about the bill's contents.   Of course, that's FOX's entire agenda.