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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (12217)	12/10/2009 7:45:23 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

I thought they proposed a change in policy. We may have a semantic problem here. This group doesn't have authority to propose a change in government policy. "The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) was convened by the Public Health Service to rigorously evaluate clinical research in order to assess the merits of preventive measures, including screening tests, counseling, immunizations, and preventive medications." "The mission of the USPSTF is to evaluate the benefits of individual services based on age, gender, and risk factors for disease; make recommendations about which preventive services should be incorporated routinely into primary medical care and for which populations; and identify a research agenda for clinical preventive care." ahrq.gov ahrq.gov ahrq.gov They offer their opinion within the framework they're given. It's like the CBO. They cost out proposed legislation based on criteria specified by Congress. They have to operate within that framework. They may think that some legislation would be a disaster based on other criteria or information outside their framework but their opinion may not reflect that because of the constraints contained in their operating framework. We and the people who do make such proposals need to understand what they are telling us based on the context in which they operate. Any proposals to change US, California, Blue Cross, or Kaiser policy come from within those entities. Someone within each of those organizations is tasked with keeping up with the literature and proposing changes where company policy can be improved. After reading the Task Force opinions, someone in the California state government proposed a change in policy and the appropriate California official signed off on it. The proposal was internal to the California bureaucracy. No one has yet proposed a change in policy for any of the US systems and the Secretary has said that such a proposal would not be made. As for the Task Force, it didn't recommend that forty-something women not get mammograms. What it did, in effect, was to give cover to organizations that don't want to pay to do so as a matter of routine.