…Except it’s not a bar. It’s the New York Times’ opinion page. And nothing funny happens, really. They just start talking about how a Sabermetric approach might help save America’s “overpriced, underperforming health care system.” This is on the New York Times’ opinion page, again. None of this is a joke. So:

Studies have shown that most health care is not based on clinical studies of what works best and what does not ” be it a test, treatment, drug or technology. Instead, most care is based on informed opinion, personal observation or tradition.

It is no surprise then that the United States spends more than twice as much per capita on health care compared to almost every other country in the world ” and with worse health quality than most industrialized nations. Health premiums for a family of four have nearly doubled since 2001. Starbucks pays more for health care than it does for coffee. Nearly 100,000 Americans are killed every year by preventable medical errors. We can do better if doctors have better access to concise, evidence-based medical information.

Look at what™s happened in baseball. For decades, executives, managers and scouts built their teams and managed games based on their personal experiences and a handful of dubious statistics. This romantic approach has been replaced with a statistics-based creed called sabermetrics…

Evidence-based health care would not strip doctors of their decision-making authority nor replace their expertise. Instead, data and evidence should complement a lifetime of experience, so that doctors can deliver the best quality care at the lowest possible cost.

Man, Joe Morgan and Jerry Manuel are going to be fucking pissed about this. Can’t we just have David Eckstein and Shane Victorino fix the health care system through a series of head-first slides and hustle plays?