Inside Politics

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By Greg Pierce

WAR ON SCIENCE

"Last week, President Barack Obama convened a health care summit in Washington to identify programs that would improve quality and restrain burgeoning costs," Drs. Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband write in the Wall Street Journal.

"He stated that all his policies would be based on rigorous scientific evidence of benefit. The flagship proposal presented by the president at this gathering was the national adoption of electronic medical records - a computer-based system that would contain every patient's clinical history, laboratory results and treatments. This, he said, would save some $80 billion a year, safeguard against medical errors, reduce malpractice lawsuits and greatly facilitate both preventive care and ongoing therapy of the chronically ill," noted the doctors, who said they voted for Mr. Obama.

"Following his announcement, we spoke with fellow physicians at the Harvard teaching hospitals, where electronic medical records have been in use for years. All of us were dumbfounded, wondering how such dramatic claims of cost-saving and quality improvement could be true.

"The basis for the president's proposal is a theoretical study published in 2005 by the RAND Corporation, funded by companies including Hewlett-Packard and Xerox that stand to financially benefit from such an electronic system. And, as the RAND policy analysts readily admit in their report, there was no compelling evidence at the time to support their theoretical claims. Moreover, in the four years since the report, considerable data have been obtained that undermine their claims. The RAND study and the Obama proposal it spawned appear to be an elegant exercise in wishful thinking."

REAL BRUTALITY

Retired Air Force Col. Leo K. Thorsness bristles when he hears the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, described as "one of the toughest prisons on the planet," as the Washington Post did in a Feb. 23 front-page article on a Kuwaiti detainee who became a suicide bomber in Iraq after his release from Gitmo.

A fighter pilot shot down over North Vietnam on April 30, 1967, Mr. Thorsness spent nearly six years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi, including a year in solitary confinement.

Speaking Thursday night at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, the Medal of Honor recipient said his North Vietnamese captors' "policy was to torture," despite having signed the Geneva Conventions. He said he was "interrogated 18 days and nights" after being captured.

Denied medical attention because of his "uncooperative attitude" and subjected to torture, Mr. Thorsness was released on March 4, 1973, still on crutches.