One In Five Million

You have to wonder if Mikey would ever happen to mention, when he talks about the cost of medicine, something about this:

I was appalled to learn of a colleague’s fate at the hands of a Mahoning County (Ohio) jury in a recent malpractice case. The patient presented with what any prudent physician would deem to be muscular back pain and went on to die of an aortic dissection. Given the patient’s age and sex, the likelihood of such an occurrence would be about two in 10 million.

The likelihood in the presence of back pain would be higher, but given the particulars of the case would still be vanishingly small. Making the diagnosis in a case like this would require a policy of obtaining a CT scan on virtually every case of back pain.

Why not obtain a CT scan on every patient with back pain or, for that matter, perform every test known to medical science on every patient who is ill? After all, peoples’ lives are at stake.

There are two reasons. First, nearly every test in medicine is inaccurate. A test that is positive often leads to further testing which, if the test result is in error, is unnecessary. Such testing is sometimes invasive and therefore potentially dangerous, and if the patient is hospitalized unnecessarily there is the additional risk of life-threatening infection. Because of this, the search for extremely unlikely diagnoses would kill more patients than would missing those diagnoses. Researchers at Dartmouth University have shown that more care is often worse care.

The second reason is cost. Embracing this policy would necessitate closing the Pentagon and abandoning public education. As it is, some of my younger colleagues, paralyzed by the fear of being sued, regularly spend $2,000 to diagnose a cold.

Malpractice is defined as a bad outcome resulting from negligence; negligence is defined as other than what a prudent physician would do in similar circumstances. That my colleague acted prudently is beyond dispute. The patient was a victim of fate, not negligence. My colleague was a victim of a process wherein a class of professionals with the morals of a drug dealer hires medical prostitutes to mislead juries in order to win the malpractice lottery. Nationwide, the money being diverted from patient care to service this process is $192 billion per year, approximately 10 percent of the entire cost of health care, enough to pay for all the costs incurred by America’s uninsured more than twice over, and far more than the annual cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I’ve probably said this before, but there is a perception in America that doctors note symptoms, look them up in a great big book and come out with a perfect diagnosis.  It ain’t so.  Medicine is as much art as science, as much instinct as knowledge.  Our bodies are not very good at indicating what’s wrong with them and most physicians have to to act on incomplete knowledge.  When they guess wrong—even when the right guess was a two in ten million shot—they get sued.  And we all pay.  Not only with malpractice premiums but with the cost of unnecessary tests.

But forgot that.  Our expensive healthcare system is entirely the result of evil insurance companies, evil drug companies and evil providers.  Don’t think.  Just feel. That’s it.  $8 for adults.  $4 for children.  Be sure to buy the DVD.

Anti-Military Recruiting Terrorists

As you all may have heard, at around 3:45 a.m. this morning EST in New York city an as yet unidentified male on a bicycle threw a home-made bomb encased in an ammunition box onto the front door step of the mlitary recruiting station in the middle of Times Square.  It’s obvious this person was targeting an identified military recruiting station, but the unanswered question is WHY?
Well, consider the rash of protesters blocking the doorways of recruiting stations and chasing recruiters away from school campuses and public places.  Consider the defacement of recruiting stations with grafitti and the harassment that soldiers who are working as recruiters have to endure from day to day by the moonbat leftists who have nothing else to do but violate the rights of these brave men and women.
When you consider the pattern of behaviors of these people, this event seems kind of inevitable.  But that certainly does not reduce the responsibility of those who committed this crime.
So what does this have to do with Michael Moore?  Glad you asked.  Go to his website and see how he this act:

Landmark Military Recruitment Center Shut Down in Times Square (no casualites reported)
“Shut Down”?  No Mikey, it was ATTACKED!  This is like someone saying the WTC was closed early on September 11, 2001 or saying flight 93 was “canceled” on 9/11 due to unruly passengers.  I mean come on!  “Shut Down”??!!  I know I shouldn’t be surprised at how Moore is downplaying the incident just because it involves a bombing of a military recruitment station, but the smugness in which he does it is what really disgusts me.  I mean this is a guy who calls our President a “war criminal” because he sent soldiers to war just like many many other Presidents before him have done.  This is a guy who calls big businesses “anti-America” while he runs his website through Canada.  This is a guy who professes to loving the minorities and identifying with the downtrodden while he lives in a Manhattan condo and sends his daughter to an exclusive private school.
I’m curious how he would react if someone “closed down” one of his offices in the same way this scumbag “closed down” the Times Square Recruiting Center.

I’ll Tell You Why

I just received a polite email from a reader named Nicole, entitled simply “Why?”

You seem to really hate Michael Moore, for reasons that aren’t evident on moorewatch.com. So my question to you is, why?

My response.

You obviously haven’t read the blog much.  We don’t “hate” Michael Moore.  I think he’s a scumbag, and I think he’s wrong on virtually everything.  That being said, Moorewatch is a repository of information that rebuts Michael Moore’s bullshit.  God knows nobody in the media will ever question anything he says, so we assumed this task ourselves.

When he says that socialized medicine is a wonderful thing, and Cuba is a paradise of free medicine, we provide hard, factual evidence that he’s lying out his ass.

It’s got nothing to do with hate, and everything to do with showing the world what a vulgar liar he is.

Seriously, read the blog.  Learn something.  For example, if you believe in fabulous government-run “free” healthcare for everyone you should at least have the intellectual honesty to be able to defend that position.  I disagree with Moore and I can tell you exactly why, and can provide copious amounts of information in support of what I believe.  If you disagree, fine, that’s a perfectly legitimate thing to do.  But you should be able to provide an honest, intellectual rebuttal to what we’ve posted.  And if you can’t, do a little soul-searching and ask yourself why.

Hate has nothing to do with it, Nicole.  Keep an open mind.  All the best.

I always wonder why so many people attribute what we do on this site to hatred of Michael Moore, when I think that even a cursory reading of the site would show that, while we clearly dislike the man, we’re making a sincere effort to be a counterweight to his lies, distortions, and general bullshit.

(Note:  Polite emails get the author’s identity protected.  People who write idiotic hate mail will be posted with full information so the rest of the world can make fun of them too.)