As we get into the nitty-gritty of health care reform, critcs from both left and right are asking whether current proposals will reduce costs. Here we have a historic opportunity to make major changes in health care, but it appears no one is willing to address the problem of escalating costs.

The public insurance option might reduce the cost of insurance by competing with for-profit insurers. But this doesn't reduce the number of unnecessary procedures. As David Brooks points out in a NY Times column, the public option, as it's currently formulated, would have no effect on the fundamental incentives that lead to higher costs.

A few more things about Bazian, the company that provides the evidence-based medicine (EBM) analysis used by Behind the Headlines. (Bazian, BTW, is named after the 18th century mathematician Thomas Bayes, as in Bayesian probability.) Those who work at Bazian call themselves evidologists. "Evidology aggregates, filters and synthesizes the entire universe of research about a given question into one odds-based answer." Hmmm. Well at least they're the first to admit this sounds grandiose. But they insist it's not: "If you're not using evidology then necessarily you are basing decisions on opinion or individual studies, and these routinely turn out to have been wrong."

Bazian has a colorful, casual, good-natured presentation on their website about EBM and what the company does. (See Sources below.) There's even a slide of Doctors Kelso and Cox from Scrubs.

Ahh yes, the change in the doctor/patient relationship. That's a subject for numerous future posts.

As promised in the last post, I have a recommendation for a source of health news. It's a site called Behind the Headlines. It comes from the National Health Service (NHS), the publicly funded health care system of the United Kingdom, and it's available on the Internet at Behind the Headlines.

The information in Behind the Headlines articles comes from Bazian, a company that provides evidence-based information to publications and healthcare systems. I won't go into all the pros and cons of evidence-based medicine (EBM) in this post. Just a brief overview, and why it's useful in analyzing the news. (EBM has a poor reputation in the US because some insurance companies have used it to deny benefits to patients.)