150 doctors in lab coats on the White House lawn. Did no one in the administration say, "Monty Python"? Can they really be this clueless?

Ricardo, Dude, the 30% burden of extra diagnostics tests is not the result of doctors arbitrarily acting like little oligarchs as you imply. It is exactly precisely the runaway cost of extravagant jury awards that forces doctors -- and their employers -- to run extra tests to protect themselves against the charge that they were negligent. Most of us think medical providers should be responsible for and liable for their errors. That can be accomplished quite nicely by capping malpractice awards at the actually economic damage incurred. So, for example, if you become disabled, and you win at trial, you get the cost of your lifetime support and lost salary -- maybe $3,000,000. What you should not get is $500,000,000 for pain and suffering. When that happens, as it did recently at Oregon Health Sciences University, the result is that 1,000 staff get fired, and the docs are ordered to be even more circumspect and obtuse in their testing and diagnostic practices. The winners in this formulation are the trial attorneys. The rest of us are the losers. If you really, really wanted costs to go down by 30 percent, you'd study the economics and then direct your snarky comments at the attorneys, who, by the way, in this instance, provide absolutely no value, no improvement in service, no advance in science or technology. They merely confiscate wealth from party A and deliver it to party B, and then the rest of us have to pay a whole lot more to restore party A to functioning status.

This is not anything new. It's hard to believe you've been able to live life and miss this.

The way this will work out.....Carrie Prejean will be the new executive producer/owner of the California contest. That solves things coming and going.