"COPS AND DOCS" AND OBAMA.

Bill Kristol responds to the president's press conference last night by characterizing it as an attack on "cops and docs." Which is, you know, not true, and demonstrative of Kristol's fraught relationship with facts. In his opening paragraphs, Kristol rambles about how Obama is talking about all these things we can't actually do, not because there are arguments against them but just because Kristol doesn't think so. Take this great line:

The juvenile happy talk reached its peak with this presidential statement: “If there's a blue pill and a red pill, and the blue pill is half the price of the red pill and works just as well, why not pay half price for the thing that's going to make you well?” Now, there’s good idea. Why hasn’t anyone else thought of that? For this reform, we need to spend $1 trillion?

Hahahaha so funny. It's almost as if Kristol has never heard of Comparative Effectiveness research, which compares medicines and procedures to determine which work best and how to fund them appropriately. It's not something we currently do much of, but it could save Americans a ton of money, just by doing almost exactly what the president described. It's pretty hard for Kristol to call someone naive when he clearly has no idea what he's talking about, but I digress -- back to the cops and docs.

The president suggested that doctors might be driven by the profit-motive. (Incidentally, isn't that a conservative article of faith -- that everyone is driven by the profit-motive?) Not the most felicitous suggestion, but certainly not an attack. There are some doctors who think that way, but a better way to put the president's example might be a doctor seeing a patient with a sore throat and thinking, "I'm going to get paid whether I fix this with cheap drugs or take out the tonsils, so I might as well go whole-hog." It's not so much greed as inefficiency, and it's a type of inefficiency we should seek to eliminate. In any case, as Atul Gawande has documented in the must-read story of the year, doctors will admit to over treating with a financial motive. Most docs hearing the president probably thought, 'I know that guy.'

Then Obama said the Cambridge Police acted "stupidly" when the arrested Henry Louis Gates. Question: Does anyone think they didn't? Indeed, not all the facts of the story are out, but I don't think anyone believes that arresting a septuagenarian for shouting at you in front of his house -- the best-case scenario for the officers -- is an example of really excellent police work. I'm not sure why we should impose an Orwellian standard on the president requiring him to suppress his opinion, or rather, as Kristol would have it, pretend that this big national news story isn't worthy of his comment. But even then, describing this as "disdain" for all police officers is sort of ridiculous. Are there even police offers who think the Cambridge Police handled the situation well? I guess this is what happens when you let a political operative pretend to be a journalist -- the facts are elided in favor of rash attacks.

-- Tim Fernholz