Brits Opt For Personalized Medicine
What’s happening under “socialized medicine”:
England is launching an extensive cancer database tracking all 350,000 new tumors detected each year as well as 11 million historical records going back as far as 30 years, in an attempt to advance personalized medicine. (FierceHealthIT)
What’s happening under ObamaCare:
In an interview with CNN the other day former White House health adviser Ezekiel Emanuel called “personalized medicine a myth.” According to his own center’s summary of the interview: [He] characterized excited public discussion of the potential of population-wide individual gene-based medicine as “hyperbolic.” He said tailoring medical treatments to individual characteristics of each patient is both overly optimistic and cost-prohibitive and likened the process to buying a custom-made suit versus one off the rack. (JCG Blog)
The next time you see Zeke on TV tell me if those suits look off-the-rack.
I doubt if Zeke wears “off-the-rack” suits. But, then again, the concept of off-the-rack (also known as ready to wear) brought down the cost of clothing. Historically, tailors made clothing and those too poor to afford a custom wardrobe had to make their own clothing or wear a few items of clothing until they fell to pieces. Ready-to-wear clothing in standardized sizes was a rare until the Civil War uniform.
At least Ezekiel Emanuel was candid enough to explain there are limits to what society can afford. As an economist once said, if people cannot afford something individually, society cannot afford it collectively.
That said, mass customization — advocated by SMU’s Michael Cox — will hopefully be the norm in medicine.
All this preventive care is supposed to supplant the need for knowing patients’ individual needs? Sounds silly to me.
Interesting point — so Obamacare has all the disadvantages and none of the advantages of socialized medicine, then?
I’m not sure that that wasn’t the idea. The more I read about the incentive structures of Obamacare, the more I think that it is a carefully crafted document to introduce people to universal health care that will need to be “fixed” by a single payer system.
It always seems like we’re several decades behind Europe, but instead of using their failure as an example, we stubbornly trudge along the beaten path. Good news is in a few decades we’ll be approaching personalized medicine.
Hmm… so you’re saying that now is the time to move to Europe? Sounds like their could be some good investment opportunities here…