Viewing profile — fricat1ve

There's nothing like Boston or NYC in the control states. If the effect is as big as they seem to think--a 21% increase in mortality--that should be visible on a plot of deaths ove…

The "objective metrics" part is key. Medical records are generally written in a way that weaves a standard narrative of the doctor as either a hero/savior or a valiant defender of …

As far as a performance evaluation that directly scores a surgeon's judgment and whether the procedures s/he is performing are actually beneficial...in the absence of a big screw-u…

In the US, if the surgery is in hospital: - Well-regarded hospitals will vet surgeons before granting privileges. - Average hospitals give out privileges fairly easily if there are…

One problem is that fee-for-service incentives strongly distort what people think they "know full well."

A better way to make this claim would be to plot the mortality rates for the states over time and show that the rates in those places requiring reporting begin to diverge as the ne…

Even consent itself is something that's overly fetishized in our society. It's a sign that a group's common understanding of people's basic rights and responsibilities has fallen a…

> if you want a cure for cancer, you have to pay scientists to look for it. We do that. It's a two-tier system where the public pays for the science and the companies fish ideas fr…

There was a story that checking ID's on plane tickets was at the top of the airlines lobbying wishlist after 9/11 so they could curtail the practice of people selling unused ticket…

>If it wasn't, why has it taken this long for someone to take ownership of that huge pile of risk-free money Maybe because no one thought of it before? The picture you're painting …

>People should be willing to pay as much for it as the alternative Maybe. But maybe there's also something wrong with expecting that much. Somehow Sidney Farber didn't decide that …

I found this comment unintentionally hilarious.

They solve this by working on diseases whose diagnostic criteria are vague enough that they can never be fully cured. Or at least no physician will ever tell someone they're "cured…

Still doesn't explain why they couldn't just release a statement warning people not to rely on the autopilot until the authorities have completed their investigation. That avoids p…

I doubt it's really about legal issues. Could they just disable or scale back the autopilot? Or at least warn people to not rely on it while avoiding any commentary about the facts…

Those studies don't say what you're claiming. I meant the pricing was post-hoc in the sense that they came up with a story like yours for why it was worth $84,000 when they were br…

You're making this very hand-wavy calculation. Hardly any 45 year olds were dying of hep C, even the older ones had lots of comorbidities & other risk factors, which is what one wo…

You keep stating this as if it were a fact, but did it occur to you that delineating what research spending in fact contributed is complex? Medicine is perhaps the industry that mo…