HHS Plans To Delete 20 Years of Critical Medical Guidelines Next Week (thedailybeast.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Daily Beast: The Trump Administration is planning to eliminate a vast trove of medical guidelines that for nearly 20 years has been a critical resource for doctors, researchers and others in the medical community. Maintained by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality [AHRQ], part of the Department of Health and Human Services, the database is known as the National Guideline Clearinghouse [NGC], and it's scheduled to "go dark," in the words of an official there, on July 16. "Guideline.gov was our go-to source, and there is nothing else like it in the world," King said, referring to the URL at which the database is hosted, which the agency says receives about 200,000 visitors per month. "It is a singular resource," Valerie King, a professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Director of Research at the Center for Evidence-based Policy at Oregon Health & Science University, added. [She] said the NGC is perhaps the most important repository of evidence-based research available.

Medical guidelines are best thought of as cheatsheets for the medical field, compiling the latest research in an easy-to use format. When doctors want to know when they should start insulin treatments, or how best to manage an HIV patient in unstable housing -- even something as mundane as when to start an older patient on a vitamin D supplement -- they look for the relevant guidelines. The documents are published by a myriad of professional and other organizations, and NGC has long been considered among the most comprehensive and reliable repositories in the world. AHRQ said it's looking for a partner that can carry on the work of NGC, but that effort hasn't panned out yet. Not even an archived version of the site will remain, according to an official at AHRQ.

Comments

The Administration that Keeps On Taking

[NEDHead]

They just can't stop themselves. Sad.

So actually no value then

[SuperKendall]

Nix has been helping coordinate an effort to get some outside stakeholder to take over the site's operations. She said she's still hopeful, and even days before the siteâ(TM)s scheduled demise, AHRQ spokesperson Hunt told the Daily Beast that the search continued.

So if it were truly a valuable resource where are the charities or groups of large insurance firms or hospitals willing to pay for this to be kept up?

The article mentioned how the database had been heavily politicized in the past, is it possible the value of this database is less than we are being told by the article writer?

Re:So actually no value then

[fyzikapan]

Actually the article makes clear that this source is particularly good because it makes a serious effort to vet articles and weed out the ones that are just pushing a company's agenda.

The administration really has no good argument for getting rid of it. The budget problem is entirely self-inflicted. Claims that it is politicized aren't particularly convincing considering that people who wound up in the Trump administration are the ones who tried to politicize it in the first place.

Re: So actually no value then

[fyzikapan]

Far better to be ignorant and have people die needlessly than to suffer the horror of a government-provided collection of medical best practices.

The private sector isn't magic. Hand this to the private sector and you'll wind up with something that's just drug pimping.

America elected an anti-government

[rsilvergun]

and anti-science administration. I'm not saying this to troll. We (or the 45% who voter for him) knew exactly what they were getting. Americans have been kicked around non stop for 40 years and unfortunately instead of blaming the billionaires that outsourced their jobs and brought in cheap labor to replace what they couldn't outsource they blamed "elites"; e.g. scientists and college professors. You know, nerds. And, well, this is the result.

Re: America elected an anti-government

[TheMiddleRoad]

The article is about deleting a valuable health database. Your response is to blame the unions. You're a moron. An abject shithead. For goodness sake, don't have children.

Re:America elected an anti-government

[GerryGilmore]

I've got mod points, but I'm gonna burn them here to support you more fully.
Specifically, we collectively - as Americans - have allowed ourselves to become incredibly stupid and brain-washed to the point that we prioritize who kneels at a sports game over who will guarantee a civilized level of medical coverage for all citizens.
As an old-school American patriot, it greatly saddens me to say that we deserve our declining fate.
When the President and Vice-President regularly appear on idiot shows (Fox and Friends, Hannity and Limbaugh, the epitome of "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas") to get their political blowjiobs and the broad electorate elects them...again, we deserve our fate of decline. Jesus wept.

Re: America elected an anti-government

[Anonymous Coward]

Anytime someone blames unions you can bet they consider themselves "fiscally conservative" and they vote R almost exclusively. But in this case I'm guessing they probably call themselves "libertarian" which means they want to do away with all taxes and regulations. They claim that they really believe that the general public will step forward and take care of everything the government currently does through private donations and private businesses will get the money and not government employees and red tape. The problem is that nobody who suddenly has an extra 25% or more income is going to immediately turn around and give that money out to people to do what the government did with our taxes.

My older brother is a good example of a modern American libertarian. He doesn't want to pay property taxes because he doesn't have kids and is 50. He doesn't think he should be paying taxes for public schools on his property. I asked him who should and he said people with children. When I pointed out to him that not very many parent could afford to send their children to what would basically become private schools he said that wasn't his problem they shouldn't have kids. I asked him if he would set aside the same % of his income he pays in taxes to support the programs and infrastructure that money currently goes to. He said he would take a look at what he wanted to support and put some of his income into that. He wouldn't say that he would give what he currently pays in taxes.

He is just another person who wants to keep more for themselves. He would not give a penny to anything because he thinks his income is his and poor people should just stop being poor. He thinks the roads and bridges will just build and maintain themselves and people will volunteer to serve in the military for free and that business will build all the weapons they need at no cost out of the goodness of their hearts. Conservative and Libertarian voters are basically one in the same. They simply don't care about what happens to everyone else as long as they get a bigger piece of the pie.

Both parties blame everything on the government and unions because it's an easy target and gives voters something to focus their anger on. I generally just ignore them because they never have any evidence to back up their claims. They can never post any peer reviewed studies to back their claims or any statistics from any official sources. It's all from websites that cater to that voter base and the only links those articles will have go to another similar website with what is basically the same article worded a little differently. They are full of solutions but every solution they offer always benefits them at the expense of others. They are not willing to make any sacrifices for the good of the country or the good of humanity as a whole. The only thing they care about is adding to what they already have. In most cases they already have more than most people but they want to get a new $250,000 RV to park at the lake where they have their $90,000 boat docked. So they blame unions and the government and vote for people who make bad laws that hurt the most vulnerable citizens of the nation and who embarrass the country in front of the rest of the world. Just so they can keep an extra few % of their income so they can add another toy to their collection.

Re: America elected an anti-government

[Anonymous Coward]

Not voting is effectively endorsing the winner. You don't care who wins.
When people quote these figures they are implying that the non-voters oppose the winner, but that is not the case.
If you don't vote, you are equally responsible for the result as those who vote for the winner.

Re: America elected an anti-government

[Joce640k]

Not voting is effectively endorsing the winner. You don't care who wins.
When people quote these figures they are implying that the non-voters oppose the winner, but that is not the case.
If you don't vote, you are equally responsible for the result as those who vote for the winner.

Either that or you didn't want to vote for any of them.

What "democracy" really needs is a meaningful "none of the above" box on the voting papers.

How should it work? If the number of people who vote "none of the above" is greater than the difference between the top two candidates then it should force a new election with new candidates.

It has lots of value

[Anonymous Coward]

It may have no commercial value, so no-one can make a profit from it.
But it can still have huge social value as general knowledge for medicine.

This is just the kind of thing the government should do.

Bernie Sanders

[rsilvergun]

or hell, even Hilary Clinton. Yeah, she's a right wing corporatists bitch, but at least she isn't openly anti-science. As terrible as she was/is it's always better to pick the lesser of two evils.

Re: Bernie Sanders

[giggleloop]

At least some of those were policy/opinion changes she made over the course of several decades. If she held the same views in 2016 as she held in 1986, she'd be an idiot. Trump's lucky if his policy opinions are the same at the end of a sentence as they were when he started it.

Um... there utterly and completely overwhelmed

[rsilvergun]

you do know we just spent the last 40 years systematically dismantling the social safety net so we could make way for tax cuts for billionaires, right?

In the entire history of humankind charity has never once solved any problem long term. It's always been civilization in the form of government that did. A few nice people at the middle can't make up for the bad done by folks up at the top. Complex, widespread problems (like public health) need comprehensive solutions done an a society wide scale. You and me dropping change into a plastic bucket twice a year is not a viable solution to the world's problems.

Re:So what? not really needed and this was well kn

[lastman71]

Not really needed by some pharmaceuticals lobby, maybe?

https://www.propublica.org/art...

Also you should remember:

"Price was the first director of HHS, AHRQ's parent agency, under the Trump Administration, before resigning under pressure last year over his spending on chartered flights."

And of course people appointed by Trump Administration think it's a duplicate. How convenient... Less money spent in research, more budget available for chartered flights!

Re:I don't think we deserve our fate

[CanadianMacFan]

Probably the best thing to do would be to stop the gerrymandering of the districts. In Canada there is an independent third-party organization that sets the ridings (districts) according to a strict set of rules.

Re:Gerrymandering has almost ZERO impact

[apoc.famine]

You are absolutely incorrect. I can understand why it doesn't seem like it could impact national elections, but it absolutely does.

Gerrymandering has allowed mostly republicans to hold onto state legislative majorities while receiving far less than half the vote. In 2012 in Wisconsin, Democrats won 52% of the aggregate vote but only 39% of the seats in the Assembly.

That majority in state legislature has allowed republicans to install laws designed to prevent voting, which disproportionately impacts democratic voters. If likely democratic voters aren't allowed to vote at all, national elections are absolutely impacted by gerrymandering.

As a great example, look at Wisconsin. While I know Mother Jones isn't necessarily a great source, feel free to click through and listen to the interview where Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel says:

How many of your listeners really honestly are sure that Sen. Johnson was going to win reelection or President Trump was going to win Wisconsin if we didn’t have voter ID to keep Wisconsin’s elections clean and honest and have integrity?

It should be noted that you can count the voter fraud convictions in WI over the last decade on one hand. "if we didn’t have voter ID to keep Wisconsin’s elections clean and honest" is absolutely saying, "if we didn't have Voter ID to keep democrats, especially blacks, from voting".

23k-45k voters are estimated to have not been able to vote due to the voter ID law. Trump won the state by 22k votes.

If the state wasn't gerrymandered, that law wouldn't have passed, and those people would have voted. The supreme court has decided to pass on this lawsuit, because apparently the democrats didn't have standing? Apparently it will take someone losing a gerrymandered district to sue, and then proving that it was the gerrymandering that caused it. I.E., gerrymandering by political parties is fine according to the supreme court. That's fucked up, and pretty undemocratic.

But we got a supreme court that thinks this way in part due to gerrymandering. How's that for full circle?