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The pork of Obamacare

The Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), created by Obamacare, announced its first round of grants today, part of a funding program of fifty “pilot projects” totaling $30 million.

It didn’t take much research for me to conclude that, while some of this work might be useful, most of it sounds like bureaucratic claptrap. For example, consider the description Nature gives for these three grants:

  • With $425,286, a team at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston will examine negative outcomes that aren’t symptoms of rare genetic diseases – such as lack of affordable drug or therapy options, insurance concerns, and social stigma. In local and virtual communities of patients with alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, they’ll try to measure these burdens.
  • A research group at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania received $668,190 to figure out how to weigh the views of children with autism with those of their parents in treatment decisions and outcome preferences.
  • At Ohio State University in Columbus, a $653,014 project will study virtual reality gaming as a potential cost-effective neurological rehab therapy for stroke patients who suffer from chronic hemiparesis, or weakness on one side of the body.

All three sound suspiciously like a waste of money, better spent in numerous other ways.

After reading the Nature article, I went to the PCORI website and randomly downloaded a half dozen other grants, just to see if my suspicions were correct. All were vague and incoherent. For example, consider this $629,626 grant to the University of Arizona for “Integrating and Comparing Community-Based Participatory and Conjoint Analysis”. Let me quote the abstract:

For this project we will implement and test two multi-component methods by which patient preferences for the delivery of behavioral health services can be efficiently gathered and translated into patient-centered care options and outcomes for SCHC, and for other FQHCs serving low-income, primarily Hispanic patients. The first multi-component method will integrate components of participatory research and systematic qualitative data collection and analysis. The second method will add conjoint analysis to further improve patient centered-care in real world, choice-based, scenarios. The conjoint survey will reflect a range of patient-centered service attributes and provider-relevant attributes important to SCHC’s complex service environment. Conjoint analysis will yield information on the relative importance of each of the attributes considered and whether there are identifiable patient segments with similar internal preferences, whose preferences differ strongly from those of other segments.

If you can tell me what any of that means, you are either lying to yourself, or getting some of the funds and want to protect your interests.

Almost all the grants were given in big urban areas that are Democratic Party strongholds. I wonder why.

But then, this is the government. What matter if this work makes no sense? What matter that there might be some political payback and pork in how the money is distributed. A government official has declared it’s important, so shut up and pay up!

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

4 comments

  • George Benkel

    Why would government help people?

  • JFincannon

    It seems that the money should be spent on things like hand, arm or leg transplants. I could not believe it when I saw a recent article about this being done in Mexico. http://apnews.myway.com/article/20120608/D9V8MUT83.html
    “Mexican man gets double arm transplant” Jun 7, 2012

    To confirm what might be a sensationalistic story, I found a legitimate source in a medical journal… Bilateral trans-humeral arm transplantation: result at 2 years. Cavadas PC, et al., Am J Transplant. 2011 May;11(5):1085-90. “… At 26 months post-transplantation, the patient has excellent elbow active movement, active flexion and extension of the thumb and fingers, useful sensation and a gainful job.”

  • Edward

    It is easy to figure out what it means, without lying or receiving funds. Get rid of the obfuscating words, substitute real words for the bogus ones, and there you have it:

    They will test two methods of determining the preferences of Latino illegal aliens for receiving psychoanalysis. The first method will combine research, data collection, and analysis. The second method will add analysis. This survey [which was an analysis in the previous sentence – go figure] will be ranked by patient preference and doctor preference. Analysis [which was a survey a moment ago] will present the rankings of these preferences and contrast them with the preferences of people who strongly disagree with those rankings.

    In case that was not clear:

    They will compare the priorities of illegal alien patients with those of doctors and contrast them with those of people with completely different priorities [perhaps the people paying for the care].

    Who can argue with that study?

    I mean, who but the taxpayer can argue with that study?

  • Sara

    the us was, and is a corrupt cesspool–what else is new?

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