'Dr. Obama's Tonsillectomy'

Here's a great editorial from the Wall Street Journal:

Dr. Obama’s Tonsillectomy

Do Americans want a federal board deciding if their kids need surgery?

Those greedy doctors. “You come in and you’ve got a bad sore throat, or your child has a bad sore throat or has repeated sore throats,” President Obama explained at Wednesday’s press conference. “The doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, ‘You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out.’”

If that’s what he really thinks is wrong with U.S. health care—and with the medical profession—then ObamaCare is going to be even worse than we thought. The point Mr. Obama oversimplified is that the way the U.S. pays for medical services can encourage some physicians to prescribe unnecessary tests or treatments, especially in Medicare. But his implication is that doctors aren’t acting in the best interests of their patients in order, basically, to rob them.

Incentives matter, yet maybe the truth is that medicine is a highly complex science in which the evidence changes rapidly and constantly. That’s one reason tonsillectomies are so much rarer now than they were in the 1970s and 1980s—but still better for some patients over others. As the American Academy of Otolaryngology put it in a press release responding to Mr. Obama’s commentary, clinical guidelines suggest that “In many cases, tonsillectomy may be a more effective treatment, and less costly, than prolonged or repeated treatments for an infected throat.”

Obama's news conference last Wednesday really was a disaster.

He needs to have representatives of the American Academy of Otolaryngology over to the White House for a beer.

...Under the system Democrats are trying to ram through Congress, these case-by-case choices, currently made between patients and care-givers, will gradually be replaced by rigid government schemes. “Part of what we want to do is to make sure that those decisions are being made by doctors and medical experts based on evidence, based on what works—because that’s not how it’s working right now,” Mr. Obama said. We await the President’s evidence that the nation’s pediatricians are striking it rich with unnecessary tonsillectomies.

The truth is irrelevant to Obama. Unnecessary tonsillectomies?

He'll say anything.

He will throw anyone under the bus if he has to.