Obamacare Vs. Cancer Cures

Even Republicans gushed with enthusiasm when President Barack Obama announced funding for personalized medicine during the State of the Union last week. “I am launching a new precision medicine initiative,” Obama said, to usher in a “new era of medicine, one that delivers the right treatment at the right time.”

Sounds good, but don’t be fooled. The biggest impediment to these cures is Obamacare, and the loudest critic of personalized medicine is Obamacare architect Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel.

Scientists already have turned the corner from one-size-fits-all medicine to fashioning cures based on a patient’s genetic makeup. Not all breast cancers or lung cancers or other afflictions are alike. They differ depending on a patient’s genes. Testing patients to see what genetic mutation is causing their sickness and then using a drug that targets it avoids wasting time on drugs that won’t work or would even make a patient sicker.

It should be the future of medicine, but Obamacare stands in the way. Members of Congress would know that if they had bothered to read the law. Obamacare forces doctors to practice one-size-fits-all medicine. The law whacks them with financial penalties if they stray from what Washington calls “evidence-based” treatments.

“Evidenced-based” means the treatment that works best for the majority of patients. Too bad if you’re not the typical patient. As Dr. Jeffrey Singer, a surgeon and adjunct fellow at the Cato Institute, says, “It is easy to standardize treatment protocols. But it is difficult to standardize patients.”

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