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Strange Bedfellows, and All That

Oct 27, 2008

Here's a trio you don't seem team up every day: Newt Gingrich, John Kerry, and Oakland A's manager Billy Beane have jointly written an op-ed in the New York Times arguing that evidence-based medicine will be the only way to improve the US healthcare system. They say:

In the past decade, baseball has experienced a data-driven information revolution. Numbers-crunchers now routinely use statistics to put better teams on the field for less money. Our overpriced, underperforming health care system needs a similar revolution. ... Remarkably, a doctor today can get more data on the starting third baseman on his fantasy baseball team than on the effectiveness of life-and-death medical procedures.

They contend that turning medicine into a data-driven enterprise, rather than one based on subjective information, could turn around a system that frequently lets patients down.

 

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