The Great Health Care Plan still doesn't exist. Oh, there's sound bites by 'people' like Max Baucus who said with a presumably straight face that a tax on employer funded health plans would be a boon to society, as it would force the companies in question to offer policies that cover substantially less, and thus stem the gross overuse of medical services in the US.
Um---OK. Gotta go,Max. Got a date with reality.
I was growling through some stats on the MEPS website. No connection to the Coneheads. It's the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey arm of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality portion of the Department of Health and Human Services branch of the Federal Government. It's most recent data is 2006. It does things like sending (self-administered)questionnaires to diabetics between the ages of 18 and 65 to find out what percentage of them had a foot exam that year.
That's not unimportant. Au contraire. Foot infections in diabetics are a mess and we spend a bazillion dollars on them every year.
But aside from the people at MEPS sending their data to AHRQ at HHS, you know what happens to this valuable data?
Nada. Nothing. Zip. There is no way, at least from the blogosphere, to find out if this data is ever used to actually help people. It's just like that large ball tossed up to the top of the Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy tower with people standing around waiting to see which hole it'll shoot out of, and hoping they don't get hurt.
So when people start throwing data at you about who's going to get what in our New Health Care System, duck.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment