(An aside: I have been looking at just the first page of each department's budget as an experiment to show just how easy it would be to cut federal government spending substantantially. You don't even have to read the whole thing, just a single page from each proposed budget section, and you've got billions and billions of dollars of savings! As my dear departed old Dad might say: Such a deal!)
(An aside within the aside: the comment that what we're cutting are "things the Regular Guy can live without" is more than folksy prose; it's a principle of the highest order. America is teetering on the edge of disaster; and, make no mistake, military disaster will inevitably follow fiscal disaster, as it has throughout human history. What on earth is the governing class thinking when they spend money we don't have on things we don't really need, i.e., things we can live without?)
OK, with those asides out of the way, here's what the Regular Guy sees on page one of the HHS budget:
The Budget includes $286 million in the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality for research that compares the effectiveness of different medical options, building on the expansion of this research begun under ARRA. The dissemination of this research is expected to lead to higher quality, evidence-based medicine, arming patients and physicians with the best available information to allow them to choose the medical option that will work the best for them.Acronyms are fuzzy little monkeys that can fool you. This all sounds fine, right, mo money equals mo health. Maybe a little bit too much consultant-speak like "evidence-based medicine".... as opposed to what? Voodoo-based medicine? But wait just a minute, there, right in the middle there's this acronymy thing called "ARRA" and this $286 million in research was apparently begun under it. What is that?
Well, it turns out that ARRA is the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.... that's right, this is "stimulus" spending President Obama enacted in 2009 that didn't stimulate anything.
(Aside #3: Don't believe me? Believe the evidence:
Sheesh, I love this chart so much, I'd really like to take credit for it. But this guy at Innocent Bystanders came up with it.)
Anyway, you can bet dollars to donuts that any "research" that began under ARRA was cooked up speedy-quick to qualify for the wheelbarrow full of newly-printed Fed simoleons that was being rolled out of Treasury. It's like "shovel-ready" projects... the only thing getting shoveled is our money out the door.
At some point, I'll make a list of the principles we're discovering as we do this exercise. Here's another one, though: if the spending program started under a stimulus bill, it wasn't worth doing otherwise.
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