Open Letter to ACS Board: Feb 22 Status and future plans

by Bud Bromley

The pending healthcare reform legislation, if enacted as proposed, eventually will result in a healthcare industrial complex crippled by the same problems as the IPCC and the EPA: the failure of the scientific peer review process. There will be one big difference: the climate crisis is not real, but the failure of peer review is guaranteed to cause a real crisis in health care, and inevitably a crisis with your personal health care or the health care of someone in your family.

The healthcare legislation requires multiple interconnected, multi-disciplinary task forces and committees to report recommendations up to the head of HHS. Over time, these will become bureaucracies and fiefdoms like the IPCC committees, NASA GISS, Hadley CRU, and the EPA. How will this community-organized healthcare industrial complex work if the scientific peer review process has failed? How will it work if the credibility of a scientist or medical research institute or diagnostic instrument company on the task force or committees is established by political connections and willingness to “tow the company line” instead of validation by empirically replicated science and engineering? The healthcare industrial complex will be unable to evaluate or debate the underlying science, having been institutionally hindered by conflicting interests.

Are you ready to trust your health care to a railroad engineer? Is a social worker’s opinion part of the consensus that sets “standard of care” for between-patient cleaning procedures for a kidney dialysis machine?

If the peer review process is not repaired by the professional societies for the hard sciences, then your health is in danger, with or without the proposed healthcare legislation. (Arguably, we are already in danger.) The managers within each professional society have fiduciary responsibility to diligently manage the peer review process and professional ethics within that profession; that is not happening today. These managers cannot delegate that responsibility to any other person or organization. To do so would contradict the definition of peer review process. A meta-organization such as the NAS or NRC (or a multidisciplinary committee as defined in the healthcare legislation) does not have the skills or experience to replicate experiments and evaluate the data; attempting such a process would look like the Copenhagen climate conference. The proper action of the meta-organization is to refer the task back to the appropriate professional society.

Professionals must police their own profession.

A properly functioning scientific peer review process keeps an organization or an individual honest and focused on goal, typically the means justify the end result. In contrast, in political ideologies typically the ends justify the means; a community organizer comes to mind. Politics and science are opposite in many respects.

The problem of junk science in AGW is just the tip of the iceberg.

The problems will spread unless the peer review process within professional societies is fixed.