Paying only for healthcare that works?

Will President Barack Obama really do that as part of modernizing our healthcare system, as Mike Madden notes he claims?

Color me HIGHLY skeptical at this point.

First thing he will have to do to de-skepticize me is get Congress to kill the Office of Complementary and Alternative Medicine inside the National Institutes of Heath.

Right now, to put it bluntly, our government is funding quackery. Until that’s stopped, well, Obama just ain’t that believable.

And, if it means butting heads with Sen.-Supplements, Orrin Hatch, all the better.

On the Dem side of the aisle, Tom Harkin clearly will be bruising for a fight, given that he thinks NICAM already turns down too many alt-med grant requests, especially if Obama gets his way on cutting Big Ag subsidies. Maybe he can be fobbed off somehow.

Second, since Obama promised during the campaign to expand George Bush’s faith-based social initiatives, many of which have already been proven to not work, we have empirical evidence from a parallel field — psychology, in place such as treatment and rehab — that Obama is ready to fund programs that don’t work at all.

So, from where this naturalistic skeptic sits, Obama already has two strikes against him, one of which, in essence, he threw against himself.