The Devil You Say?

Did you know that Jews and Christians are the Devil? No really see the Muslims have figured it all out.

Wowzers!
This kind of thing reminds me of the Waterboy.

If You Want It You Must Fight For It

So since I’m a terrorism and technology blog I thought I share some of my feelings about the coming crisis with the Comprehensive Medical Reform Bill aka Obamacare.

So to shed some light on where I’m coming from I’ll tell you more about myself. I am an Army vet I spent a few years in and then got out for personal reasons. I enjoyed my time while I was in and I enjoyed my job. I did Intelligence work; gathering intel and processing it. While I was in I knew a guy, not real well, but I worked with him and I liked him. He like I volunteered to go over to a theater of operation and unlike me he was accepted. This guy wasn’t there for a few weeks and he got hit by a mortar round in the green zone. Shit happens, its war.

What bothered me about the situation is not so much that he got hurt it was the extent of his injuries. You see he lost an eye, most of his right leg and arm. He lost a portion of his left leg and part of his left hand. For a military guy he was pretty much done when it comes to his career. I know there a few that get back up and continue their service but this guy was not going to see that. Now I’m not bothered by his injures because he is maimed and disfigured in fact that hardly bothers me. No, what bothered me is the shear uselessness of our prosthetics.

I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I got out of high school which is why I didn’t go straight to college. I joined the Army so I would be a productive member of society and have time to think about what I wanted to do as well as have money for college when I got out. It was the non-advanced prosthetics our people had available to them and my want to make them better that I went out to school to become and Engineer.

I wanted to do prosthetics so I needed to have some medical background mainly the basics as well as some electrical and mechanical engineering studies. So I went the route of becoming and Biomedical Electrical Engineer. I have a few classes more to finish a degree and then I want to get to work.

I’ve been doing a lot of studying on companies to work for and aside from DARPA groups there are not too many companies that actual work in this field which explains the lack of quality prosthetics out there. So I decided about a year or so ago that I would go to work for a few years in industry then start a research company.

Well In the last year a great deal has happened today we have the financial regulatory overhaul that I have no doubt will screw over young entrepreneurs, but we also have the ever so wonderful Obamacare. The medical field is going to change and the bill already affects research specifically in the field I wish to work in.
The interesting thing is the increase in research money that has been devoted to my field of research. However, the research money that has been allocated is not for research in new technologies. The research money has been set aside for Comparative Effectiveness studies.

Comparative Effectiveness is defined by the AHRQ as “research [that] is designed to inform health-care decisions by providing evidence on the effectiveness, benefits, and harms of different treatment options. The evidence is generated from research studies that compare drugs, medical devices, tests, surgeries, or ways to deliver health care.

In other words it is designed to find the cheapest route but not necessarily the most effective route. This is of course how comparative effectiveness has been used in every country that employs a nationalized health care.

The problem with this is that new technologies are only expected to be developed so long as they can produce a cheaper alternative to what is out there not necessarily a healthier lifestyle for the patient. This is why the healthcare bill hurts the field I wish to go into. The tools employed will be more expensive than a faux arm with a hook attached to a lingering muscle ligament. I have no problem that my field of study is vastly more adaptive to the situation at hand but I want to do what I want to do and the healthcare bill has more than likely killed my dream.
If reality could only match the idealness of this bill. Alas, I have no delusions about the future and grim dreary landscape it holds. I also cannot accept that all is well when history has shown time and time again that Statist Healthcare systems do not care about the well being of the patient only about the bottom line. Research will be stymied as well as it has in all the rest of the countries with Nationalized Healthcare and the prospects of healthcare getting better and cheaper will no longer exist.

I am not resigned to this grim future. I will do everything possible to fight it. It is not about me but about the men and women who have served us and my want to serve them in return. I will not go silently into the night while the my field burns in flames set by the agressors.