Medicare Will Pay for "Heart Scans"! WTF?

You've got to be fucking kidding me.

Medicare has agreed to pay for heart imaging studies?

What the fuck?

Let's not pay for things for which there is clear evidence (or at least not pay adequately for them), and let's pay for cardiac imaging, for which there has been no clear impact on morbidity and mortality.

It looks like the American College of Cardiology and the American College of Radiology (along with a number of pseudo-organizations, such as the Society of Cardiovascular Computed Tomography) are our heroes here.

Of course, the rest of us know that they're behind this because it leads to more interventional cardiology procedures. One can never do enough stenting, you know...

In the meantime CVT surgeons are getting screwed, despite the fact that they've got a superior intervention....and the folks that are behind aggressive medical management are REALLY screwed.

This decision so perfectly demonstrates why complete anarchy is necessary to reform our health system. The whole fucking thing needs to be blown up:

• Incentives are skewed to benefit the high-tech proceduralists, independent of evidence.
• The average person is brainwashed to believe that they need these things.
• People get things that they don't need, and they get hurt.
• The system pays for the complications.
• There's little money left for the physicians that do the work to lower costs and improve outcomes for the system.
• Medicare's decision here leads to unnecessary testing and intervention, and thus more intervention without benefit.

How can it be possible to have true health care reform without saying 'no' to some things???