Many of you may remember the 60 Minutes segment from last January in which they showed dogs detecting cancer by smelling urine samples:

One dog failed completely, but two picked out the cancerous sample 60 percent of the time. The overall average was 41 percent success. That percentage may seem small, but Willis says it amounts to a major success for the dogs.

“The 41 percent, as far as I’m concerned, was a remarkable result,” says Willis. “And it was highly statistically significant.”

Well if that was remarkable then a new class of adjective is needed to talk about the results of this study:

In this study, five household dogs were trained within a short 3-week period to detect lung or breast cancer by sniffing the breath of cancer participants.
…
The results of the study showed that dogs can detect breast and lung cancer with sensitivity and specificity between 88% and 97%. The high accuracy persisted even after results were adjusted to take into account whether the lung cancer patients were currently smokers. Moreover, the study also confirmed that the trained dogs could even detect the early stages of lung cancer, as well as early breast cancer. The researchers concluded that breath analysis has the potential to provide a substantial reduction in the uncertainty currently seen in cancer diagnosis, once further work has been carried out to standardize and expand this methodology.

How soon will every household have a dog trained to do this?

Is a single payer national health care system inevitable? John Cole thinks so:

I think the fight over some form of nationalized health care is over, and that we will one day have a European-style system in place. The only question is when big business will successfully pressure the government to take over and how much of their current health care funding responsibilities they can manage to lay at the feet of government.

A couple of thoughts. First, it is not at all clear that business will really come out ahead if they push all health care costs onto the government. Government will expect businesses to contribute pay taxes in an amount similar to what they are already paying for employee health care. And, you can expect this amount to continue to rise.

Second, and this leads to the modest proposal, businesses do not really have any health care funding responsibilities today. Many, especially large, businesses do include the cost of some or all of a health insurance maintenance plan in their compensation packages. But what they include they can take out. It is simply a matter of providing a competitive compensation package that allows them to hire the quality of employees they need to be successful.

A better way to get out of the health care funding bind than inviting the government deeper into their revenue streams would be for businesses to eliminate health maintenance plans from their compensation packages. This will be easier in non-union businesses but should still be achievable for all that see these costs as a problem.

How does a business make this step. Take the total cost per employee that is going toward a health maintenance plan today and make that part of the employees cash compensation. The new total becomes the forward going salary. The employee then may purchase what ever type of maintenance or insurance plan they choose.

The last Grand Rounds of the year features the best posts of 2005.

The doc was late as is the case more often than not. I worked through all the year old magazines on the side table and then started on the walls. Ahh, there’s a sign I hadn’t noticed before: