Whose Money?

There are times that I truly wonder what has happened to some reporters. Medscape reports on the proposed genetic tracking proposal of the Administration, yes that is what it really is, and they state:

Putting his money where his mouth is, President Obama will seek $215 million to finance the Precision Medicine Initiative he first mentioned in his State of the Union speech on January 20.

 Putting whose money! It is NOT his $215 million, it is ours you nimwhit! This is the problem many folks have. The fail to understand the very fundamentals of our economy. They continue:

Putting his money where his mouth is, President Obama will seek $215 million to finance the Precision Medicine Initiative he first mentioned in his State of the Union speech on January 20.

They continue:

The NIH has been in contact with 200 studies that have at least 10,000 enrollees each, which it hopes to integrate into the overall cohort, Dr Collins said. Volunteers will be needed to round it out.
The data will be accessible to qualified researchers and likely also will be used by pharmaceutical, device, and diagnostic companies, he said. An early outcome "will be to take this field of pharmacogenomics — the right drug at the right dose for the right person — and really put it to the test," Dr Collins said. The FDA has approved more than 100 drugs with labeling urging DNA testing before use. "And yet it's not being done because the logistics are all wrong." But with a database that offers results on a million people, "it's a click of the mouse for the doctor to figure out whether it's a different drug or a different dose," he said.

The proposal was in NEJM. It stated:

The concept of precision medicine — prevention and treatment strategies that take individual variability into account — is not new¹; blood typing, for instance, has been used to guide blood transfusions for more than a century. But the prospect of applying this concept broadly has been dramatically improved by the recent development of large-scale biologic databases (such as the human genome sequence), powerful methods for characterizing patients (such as proteomics, metabolomics, genomics, diverse cellular assays, and even mobile health technology), and computational tools for analyzing large sets of data. What is needed now is a broad research program to encourage creative approaches to precision medicine, test them rigorously, and ultimately use them to build the evidence base needed to guide clinical practice. The proposed initiative has two main components: a near-term focus on cancers and a longer-term aim to generate knowledge applicable to the whole range of health and disease. Both components are now within our reach because of advances in basic research, including molecular biology, genomics, and bioinformatics. Furthermore, the initiative taps into converging trends of increased connectivity, through social media and mobile devices, and Americans' growing desire to be active partners in medical research.

It simply is taking all of our personal genetic data and handing it over to the FEDs so they can figure out what is the "best" way they can deal with us.

One should beware. This is a massive intrusion into our lives and the results could be catastrophic. Precision medicine is not personal medicine. It is the development of least cost delivery and the tails be damned. Namely they will deal with the +/- one sigma and the rest may just go by the wayside. Where is Nancy Pelosi when we really need her, she could have made this real clear!