The words most often used to denote the retooling of health care—“Health 2.0,” “Digital Health,” and “eHealth”—say next to nothing. Apparently that’s how some people want it to be.

I call it Personal Health Tech because empowering individual consumers (and caregivers, too) is a huge opportunity. It’s desperately needed because health care in the US is becoming increasingly bureaucratic and expensive. The good news is that Personal Health Tech is enabled by stuff that’s within reach of virtually everyone: smartphones, apps, and cloud services. Hopefully, what’s currently happening in US health care will prove analogous to the rise of the personal computer.

Unfortunately, many health care pundits downplay the personal empowerment angle. They apparently feel that most people are uninterested in or incapable of personal empowerment. They believe that it is enough for patients to participate in their own care. They scoff at solutions touted by sophisticated early adopters. But that’s generally how successful technologies get their start.

The most common criticism of my Op-ed last week, Obamacare and the vanishing medical miracle, was that government meddling in citizens' personal health care decisions under ObamaCare is a right-wing myth.

That would be reassuring--if only it were true. The first question that needs to be asked is: Why would the President of the United States offer his opinion about a personal health care decision ("Maybe you are better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller") if he didn't believe that it is an appropriate topic of public policy?

The lead editorial in today's Wall Street Journal provides further evidence. Cheesecake Factory Medicine fingers several of ObamaCare's intellectual gurus and demonstrates that they really do believe that government is most capable of reducing waste, that decisions about what gets paid for and what doesn't should be made by an Independent [sic] Payment Advisory Board, and that medical treatments should be standardized. So just forget all of that talk about personalized health care.

One of the gurus is former White House budget director Peter Orszag:

So get a load of Mr. Orszag's Tinker Bell alternative, which he called the "most important institutional change" after ObamaCare passed in 2010: the Independent Payment Advisory Board composed of 15 philosopher kings who will rule over U.S. health care.

Who are these Orszag 15? Well, nobody knows. The board was supposed to be up and running by the end of September, but the White House is avoiding naming names for Senate confirmation until after the election. No one knows, either, what this group of geniuses will propose, but that too is part of the grand Orszag plan.

Another is Atul Gawande:

...the surgeon and influential New Yorker magazine writer Atul Gawande, has further instructions for the medical masses, this time from—believe it or not—the Cheesecake Factory, the chain restaurant.

Dr. Gawande's point is that medicine would function better if care were delivered by huge health systems that can achieve economies of scale, like commercial kitchens. Care ought to be standardized like preparing a side of beef, with a "single default way" to perform each treatment supposedly based on evidence, with little room for personalization.

The editorial notes that in preparation for these changes the US health care industry is undergoing major consolidation. Hospitals and health insurance companies are merging to better grapple with anticipated new layers of bureaucracy and regulations.

Here is precisely the kind of thing that we should worry about:

The immediate danger of the Orszag-Gawande-Obama vision is that layer on layer of new regulation will lock in less-than-best practices. This makes the status quo worse, because too-big-to-fail oligopolists have less incentive to innovate to reduce costs and improve quality.

The longer-run danger is that Mr. Orszag's cost board starts to decide what types of care "work" for society at large and thus what individual patients are allowed to receive. One way or another, health costs must come down. And if Mr. Ryan's market proposal is rejected, then government a la Orszag will do it by brute political force.

A murderer's row of liberal health-care gurus—Zeke Emanuel, Neera Tanden, Don Berwick, David Cutler, Uwe Reinhardt, Steve Shortell, Mr. Orszag, many others—recently acknowledged as much in the New England Journal of Medicine. They conceded that "health costs remain a major challenge" despite ObamaCare. That would have been nice to know in, oh, 2009 or 2010.

Anyhow, their big idea is the very old idea of price controls that are "binding on all payers and providers," much as post-RomneyCare Massachusetts is already doing. When that strategy fails as it always has, and the public denies further tax increases, the Orszag payment board will then start to ration or prohibit access to medical resources that it decides aren't worth the expense.

My opinion piece at the Daily Caller:

Obamacare is an imminent threat to people with life-threatening medical conditions.

People with serious medical conditions often achieve miraculous results in the U.S. thanks to a private health care system that gives them the freedom to track down and go to doctors with the right knowledge and experience. These people, who have the greatest and most urgent health care needs, will be stymied by Obamacare’s new layers of bureaucracy. Instead of swiftly obtaining the right diagnosis and treatment, they will lose precious time submitting forms and filing appeals.

As every physician knows, it’s important to arrive at a correct diagnosis as soon as possible because medical conditions are most treatable in their early stages.

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal illustrates the point. “Facing Lifesaving Heart Surgery, Twice” bemoans the plight of people who had heart surgery as children only to experience further heart problems as adults. Doctors were often baffled because their hearts had been reconfigured during childhood. In some cases, the best course of action proved to be going back to the pediatric hospitals and surgeons who performed the original operations. This is possible in a private health care system because patients are correctly viewed as customers. Under Obamacare — a system that perceives people with serious medical conditions as financial burdens to a government already deeply in hock — these patients are more likely to find themselves boxed in by rules designed to contain costs.

Read the rest here.

Now New York City's technocrats want to control what residents and visitors eat and drink: Health panel talks about wider food ban

Businesses and individuals will find ways around all such rules. And what about individuals who need high calories? This is really about doing away with individualism.

At the meeting, some of the members of board said they should be considering other limits on high-calorie foods.

One member, Bruce Vladeck, thinks limiting the sizes for movie theater popcorn should be considered.

"The popcorn isn't a whole lot better than the soda," Vladeck said.

Another board member thinks milk drinks should fall under the size limits.

Why stop there? Why not track and regulate each person's food intake, exercise, and other habits?

It's sad to see the US drifting further and further toward liberal fascism. Are we willing to sacrifice individual freedom and choice so that perhaps there will be less obesity? Could such policies have negative unintended consequences? Are one-size-fits-all solutions healthy for society? Isn't it better to let people make mistakes--isn't that how important lessons are learned?

Many of our leaders emphasize the need for more corporate social responsibility. Companies shouldn't just pursue profits--they should contribute to the common good. But if that's the case, why did the Obama administration with the support of congressional Democrats impose a punitive tax on makers of medical devices?

An OpEd in today's Wall Street Journal (ObamaCare's Killer Device Tax) by Henry I. Miller explains why this tax is destructive--particularly how it achieves the opposite of the administration's claimed goals by discouraging jobs, manufacturing, and economic growth.

Miller points out that the tax is especially hard on the startups and small companies that are a source of so much innovation:

Many medical device companies have to ramp up sales before they become profitable. Due to the long, draconian and sometimes unpredictable regulatory process that must be negotiated before a product can be sold, it can take from $70 million to $100 million in total sales before these businesses make their first cent of profits. Nevertheless, they would have to pay the excise tax on their revenue.

Though I have to disagree with Miller on one point:

Anticipating the excise tax, several companies already have announced layoffs or withheld investments. Recent surveys show that medical technology executives are examining a host of other undesirable options, including passing along the added costs through price increases. Even if the market would tolerate that—which is surely questionable given the current pressure to drive down costs—it would, ironically, raise the costs of medical care. That was not supposed to be an outcome of ObamaCare.

Does anyone really believe that ObamaCare was designed to make medical care less expensive? If there is one thing that economists should be able to agree on, it's that competition drives down prices. By making it harder for startups and small companies to succeed, the medical device tax will reduce competition and drive costs (and therefore prices) up.

I recently wrote an article for the Commonwealth Secretariat's magazine, Global Briefing. The article identifies four areas in which technology can drive down the cost of health care--provided we let it:

Everyone wants the best medical care that money can buy. Diagnostic imaging systems let doctors peer inside the body – often detecting health problems in their earliest, most treatable, stages. Implantable pacemakers and defibrillators restore the heart’s proper rhythm. Cochlear implants help many people hear, and retinal implants are just a matter of time. But the best medical care that money can buy involves some costly technology.

In fact, sophisticated medical equipment is widely seen as one of the chief reasons that today’s health care is so expensive. While consumers want access to the latest advances, critics say we have become too dependent on expensive technology and that people in wealthy nations are over-diagnosed and over-treated. Given the high cost of medical technology, a number of policy-makers have concluded that we should ration access to the most aggressive treatments.

But exactly why is medical technology so expensive? There are several reasons. Patients insist that the health care industry performs flawlessly, so we subject new medical systems and devices to a phalanx of certifications, regulations and clinical trials – all of which add cost. But the main reason is that the industry has been so busy integrating computers and communications into medical products that the technology is only now beginning to stabilise and mature.

Developments in four key areas will drive down the cost of health care: high-end medical systems are being equipped with productivity-enhancing features; remote solutions that let specialists apply their skills at a distance are being deployed; mobile solutions that enable physicians to save time and money are coming to market; and personal health technology that helps consumers stay healthy and manage chronic medical conditions is starting to take off.

You can read the entire article here.

The Wall Street Journal is on a roll--at least in terms of technology reporting. The cover story in this weekend's Review section, Citizen Scientists, discusses people who are demanding the right to control their own medical data and are even conducting their own research. Also known as "health hackers," these individuals are challenging the claim that their genomic data belongs to the laboratories who do the DNA testing and that only trained professionals should be able to perform clinical trials.

The article is particularly ironic given that just yesterday (see below) the Wall Street Journal ran a piece about academic labs producing findings that commercial labs are unable to reproduce. Sure enough, the Science Establishment is responding to the citizen scientists by circling its wagons: They are amateurs. Their data collection methods are not sufficiently rigorous. Their sample sizes are too small. And worst of all, the work of citizen scientists isn't supervised by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA).

Unfortunately, some of the activists want to take things to the other extreme. They want to create an Information Commons that would for all intents and purposes abolish intellectual property rights. It's one thing to suggest that my genetic information belongs to me, and it's another to suggest it belongs to everyone. Getting scientists to agree to share data will discourage innovative research. It's also a form of bullying: if the Information Commons catches on, then you can bet there won't be many jobs for scientists who decline to sign an agreement to share their data.

Some of the organizations mentioned in the article are Genetic Alliance, Center for Connected Health, and Sage Bionetworks (That'sMyData! project).

There is an important article today on the front page of the Wall Street Journal: Scientists' Elusive Goal: Reproducing Study Results.

Two years ago, a group of Boston researchers published a study describing how they had destroyed cancer tumors by targeting a protein called STK33. Scientists at biotechnology firm Amgen Inc. quickly pounced on the idea and assigned two dozen researchers to try to repeat the experiment with a goal of turning the findings into a drug.

It proved to be a waste of time and money. After six months of intensive lab work, Amgen found it couldn't replicate the results and scrapped the project.

Contrary to what most people think, government funding is a bad influence on science research. It encourages people to perform research and present findings that are pleasing to the agencies that dispense the funds. Research at private universities and companies is generally more honest and, overall, far more beneficial to society.

See my Op-Ed today at The Daily Caller:

With data breaches and cyber attacks littering the news, Google’s mission, “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” is proving increasingly dangerous. By purposely storing all of the world’s information in one place, putting everyone’s eggs in one basket, Google exposes Internet users, content producers and even governments to huge and unnecessary risks. The utopian vision behind Google’s mission — that all information (including private property) should be centralized in the hands of one unaccountable entity — can only lead to a series of disasters and ultimately tyranny.

Read the whole thing here.

There is no excuse for the infectious disease epidemic raging in many of America’s hospitals and nursing homes.

According to the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, more than 100,000 lives are lost to hospital infections each year. The major culprits include methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE), and Clostridium difficile (C-Diff).

The saddest part, according to the Committee, is that the infections are preventable. And the solutions are relatively low tech. People admitted to hospitals should be screened for MRSA. The spread of VRE and C-Diff can be halted through better hygiene and more thorough room cleaning. (It doesn't do much good when caregivers put on sterile gloves, pull open contaminated curtains, and then touch the patient.) There is also evidence that giving daily probiotics (namely lactobacillus acidophilus) to patients on antibiotics can prevent germs such as C-Diff from taking over their digestive systems.

Betsy McCaughey, Chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, warns in Unnecessary Deaths: The Human and Financial Costs of Hospital Infections that “The situation is growing more dangerous because, increasingly, hospital infections cannot be cured with commonly used antibiotics.” McCaughey points out that more people die each year from hospital infections than from lack of health insurance.

You can make donations to the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths here.

Entrepreneur Ron Gutman says the era of Interactive Health is fast approaching. He envisions a future in which:

● Mobile and online applications for improving health are fast, simple and accessible anytime and anywhere.

● Personalization reigns, and personalized tools help you receive secure, tailored, relevant and actionable health information that’s all about you.

● 24/7 easy access to trusted physicians and their wisdom, online and offline, facilitate a continuum of care in a seamless, effective and secure way.

● Interactive technologies provide access to and facilitate communication with relevant, experienced individuals and support groups to help you make informed decisions.

● Simple tools with game-like interactions make it fun to become and remain engaged in your health.

These are nice generic capabilities but they are beginning to sound like platitudes. What's needed are compelling applications. Most interactive health startups seem to believe they can capture the broad consumer market first and then expand to serve people struggling daily with specific medical conditions.

I think interactive health is going to evolve the other way around. People with specific medical conditions have urgent needs, the motivation to learn how to adapt and use the technology, and clearer return on investment scenarios. In fact, it might be better to focus first on people with rare disorders, developing tools that some will conclude they literally can't live without.