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The Politics of Preventive Medicine
“The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true.”
HL Menken
A recurring theme of mine is the maddening, confounding and fascinating complexity of human health and disease. Common sense, unifying principles, and single-explanation theories cannot encompass the diversity of the human organism. Easily understandable, common sense approaches to health care can often be ineffective or counterproductive. Lay people and their political representatives rarely grasp these intricacies, which leads to poor individual choices and public policy.
Obamacare panders to these tendencies by stressing “preventive care” as a core principle. What could be more sensible and cost-effective than preventing disease by finding it early? Two papers published last week seriously question these underlying assumptions and raise fundamental issues about the integrity of the medical foundations of Obamacare.
Tags: breast cancer, breast cancer mortality, core principle, hl menken, human organism, prostate cancers, sense approachesA Political Lesson From Verlee Prybyloski – Worth Remembering
The country has not heard of Verlee Prybyloski – at least not in pop culture terms.
But she is one of those rare individuals who understand how and why voters vote the way they do, and our national political leaders would do well to take her political advice now.
With the advent of 24/7 cable news, politics is everywhere, and thus, people are subject to a little bit of this and a little bit of that, politically. They are constantly being told what to think, and what not to think, from both sides of the aisle.
Tags: advance degrees, national political leaders, political advice, political consultant, rare individuals, rocket science, western pennsylvania