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In Error, Tricare Tells 600K Military Beneficiaries They've had COVID-19

posted by martyb on Tuesday July 28 2020, @08:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the speedy-recovery dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/07/22/error-tricare-tells-600k-beneficiaries-theyve-had-covid-19.html:

More than 600,000 people in Tricare, a health care program of the United States Department of Defense Military Health System, received emails July 17 asking if they would donate blood for research as "survivors of COVID-19."

But just 31,000 people affiliated with the U.S. military have been officially diagnosed with the coronavirus, which prompted confusion, Military.com reported last week.

"Just wondering [if] anybody [got] an email from Tricare saying since you are a COVID survivor, please donate your plasma.?? I have NOT been tested," wrote a beneficiary on Facebook. "Just remember all those people inputting data are human and make mistakes."

The mass email went to every beneficiary located near a collection point.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:44PM (3 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:44PM (#1029006)

    because they helped slow down medical research

    The credo is: safe and effective.

    First, do no harm. Demonstrate that your drug, device, whatever is safe to use. In the event that it is not completely safe, then the burden is to demonstrate that the potential harm is outweighed by the expected benefits.

    Effective: does the drug, device, whatever do what is claimed better than placebo? Placebo is a pretty high bar, just paying attention to someone's problem is often enough to fix it, but we really don't need more placebos on the market charging money for what could be accomplished with a decent bedside manner.

    You think anything that is regulated "slowed down" by the FDA is actually going to reach and positively impact even 10% of the people on this planet? You must have been smoking with Elon.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 31 2020, @01:43PM (2 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 31 2020, @01:43PM (#1029272) Journal

    First, do no harm.

    There we are. No one sees the harm of opportunity cost. Everyone sees the harm from a few people dying from a bad drug.

    You think anything that is regulated "slowed down" by the FDA is actually going to reach and positively impact even 10% of the people on this planet?

    Much closer to 100% than that. By the end of this century, I think most people no matter where they are in the world will be part of the developed world and have access to advanced medical technology. Thus, the amount of time the FDA obstructs medical progress by "doing no harm" means their lives in the future will be a little bit poorer and shorter lived.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 31 2020, @02:06PM (1 child)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday July 31 2020, @02:06PM (#1029286)

      No one sees the harm of opportunity cost.

      In most cases, no one knows the value of opportunity. There's speculation, hope, guesses, estimates, but you don't really know the future.

      I think most people no matter where they are in the world will be part of the developed world and have access to advanced medical technology.

      Most of this "advanced medical technology" you are concerned with bringing to the broader masses is a bunch of over-complicated, over-priced, "value creation" that could and should be boiled down to the essence of what it does to improve patients health/quality of life, but instead is being developed to extract ever-more profit out of the sick. The "free market" is doing little or nothing to steer product development toward patient benefit.

      Thus, the amount of time the FDA obstructs medical progress by "doing no harm" means their lives in the future will be a little bit poorer and shorter lived.

      Go find Kurzweil and do some meditative yoga while you extrapolate simple concepts into utopian images of the future. Better hurry, he's going to miss the singularity by a wide margin, and so are you.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 31 2020, @11:06PM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 31 2020, @11:06PM (#1029517) Journal

        In most cases, no one knows the value of opportunity. There's speculation, hope, guesses, estimates, but you don't really know the future.

        Doesn't mean that opportunity costs should be ignored just because "no one knows". And you follow it up with

        I think most people no matter where they are in the world will be part of the developed world and have access to advanced medical technology.

        Most of this "advanced medical technology" you are concerned with bringing to the broader masses is a bunch of over-complicated, over-priced, "value creation" that could and should be boiled down to the essence of what it does to improve patients health/quality of life, but instead is being developed to extract ever-more profit out of the sick. The "free market" is doing little or nothing to steer product development toward patient benefit.

        Why rhetorically invoke the "free market" when the FDA makes it very non-free? I'll note a second, more recent post from a different story where you non-sarcastically observe [soylentnews.org]:

        We're not angels. If you want to identify the devil in the room, call it capitalism.

        I have watched ideas that work, could have been saving lives for the past 20 years with basically trivial per-patient cost, be shelved because the reality of my industry is that it takes a lot of money to get anything properly launched and supported in the broad market and that money gets apportioned to the "best" ideas, meaning the ones that will return maximal ROI. So, for the past 20 years a virtual cure for bulimia has been ignored. Another for meconium aspiration with similarly dramatic (like 95+%) improvement in outcome, and potential application for things like alveolar collapse associated with COVID, similarly shelved.

        The Devil is a little less than 80% evil, the angels of capitalism do sometimes direct resources where they do the most good for the most people - those shelved ideas aren't "taking up oxygen" from other ideas that ostensibly do more good for more people. Sucks when you're one of the people that would benefit from a shelved technology, but if your pet technology were taken out and developed the thinking goes that it would be taking away more benefit from other things than it provides itself.

        In the big picture, 1 million premature deaths a couple of times every 100 years from an out of control pandemic, while scary when it happens, isn't as worthwhile to address as something more mundane but pervasive, like clean drinking water. Yes, we can do both, but reality is: we can't actually do all the things. Ideas are easy, development is work, marketing is risky.

        In the big picture, 1 million premature deaths a few times a century or millennium from bad medical technology, while scary when it happens, isn't as worthwhile to address as the irreversible development of better medical technology. The FDA enables the non-free market in medical technology where obvious medical advances like your "virtual cure for bulimia" can be ignored in preference to "over-complicated, over-priced, 'value creation'". They're the gate keepers that keep out ideas with too low a ROI, the barrier to entry for new advances that would upset the status quo and make our lives better.