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Moneyball solution to health care?

Billy Beane tackles the health care crisis in a New York Times piece, along with Newt Gingrich and John Kerry.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/opinion/24beane.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin

The mind boggles (particularly if your last names are Lincoln or Armstrong and you work for a baseball team in the Northwest....). (And this isn't a political thing...just a shot at our two local baseball execs.....would love to see their heads explode if this got any traction nationally.)

1 recs  |  Comment 14 comments

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This is more of a public policy topic than a political topic.

In the US those usually end up being the same thing (which is weird, for reasons I’m not permitted to explain here).

I happen to work for a think tank that does mostly public policy research, so I’ll echo Beane’s comments by quoting a sign on the wall in our boardroom:

“If it matters, measure it.”

I like using semi-colons; they make me feel smart.

by Llewdor on Oct 27, 2008 9:16 AM PDT up reply actions   0 recs

But...but....but...

…what about the intangibles?

/Howchuck

by rtang on Oct 27, 2008 10:19 AM PDT up reply actions   0 recs

Very slippery slope alert

Interesting piece, but this diary may not be long for the world.

Nice Guys Finish Third - Hopelessly lost, but makin' good time.

by pdb on Oct 24, 2008 3:24 PM PDT reply actions   0 recs

Not a problem if it's nuked....

Just thought it was interesting, juxtaposed to Armstrong’s long standing antipathy to Beane and his methods…

by rtang on Oct 24, 2008 3:32 PM PDT up reply actions   0 recs

Thanks for being brave

and posting that article, despite the strict anti-politics laws that are placed here. It was a very good read. Without going all political, I think all business, including health care, should use more of a moneyball approach to building their companies.

JI/Robert '08!

by Fin on Oct 25, 2008 4:09 PM PDT reply actions   0 recs

Perspective from a current medical student:

Things are changing, albeit more slowly than ideal. Basic medical statistical lectures are included from the first year on, most likely as a response to it being placed on the USMLE Step 1 exam (a very hard version of the SAT that covers the first 2 years of medical school). Right now, most of what we learn involves being able to understand the numbers that tell us if a diagnostic test or treatment is effective at what it does. Work by the Cochrane group often shows up.

Unfortunately, with all of the other information that gets thrown at us in the first year, most of this information is viewed as tangential at best by the students. However, if more emphasis was put into it from big picture perspective (new institutes and funding) down to the education level (more time spent working on it), it would not be that hard to change core viewpoints. Medicine in the biomedical science format of the past century forces physicians, especially primary care physicians, to be open to new techniques/treatments/advances. Now they just need to be convinced that how those advances are evaluated are just as important as the actual advances themselves.

by GhettoBear04 on Oct 25, 2008 9:02 PM PDT reply actions   0 recs

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