I've been reading up on Daschle's health care "reform" ideas and think they are scary. [View All]

All that's gonna happen is that the lobbyists will gather around his new "Health Fed" to work their evil wiles. Drug company money, insurance co. $$, etc. will continue to have their way in deciding what is reimbursable. "Evidence-based" evaluations are largely a scam, because they can ignore many treatment effects/side effects by simply not testing for them, i.e. by excluding them from the evidence. There will be no more incentive than now to develop non-patentable interventions, and the ability of researchers to cover up unwanted results will continue unabated.

I can name you probably ten non-drug interventions for a variety of mental health problems that are very effective, but for various reasons (e.g. because they don't fall into the prevailing paradigm, because they are too expensive, because they have been blackballed by biased researchers) are not reimbursable. I don't see this situation getting anything but worse under the system Daschle has been advocating.

Examples of such therapies, all non-drug, non-invasive, and at least as effective as the "approved" therapies: Cranial electrostimulation; Thought Field Therapy/Emotional Freedom Technique; half a dozen varieties of eeg training; hematoencephalography.

The Daschle plan just seems to be a new system for licensing Big Pharma and Big Medicine and Big Insurance to continue the same old games.

We need a system in which health care is universally accessible and treatment decisions are made by licensed providers and well-informed patients, not by some faceless, corruptible bureaucracy.