I just found a way to save 25 billion dollars a year for President Barack Obama’s healthcare plans. That is to cut out angioplasty (currently called percutaneous coronary intervention, or PCI), for which multiple studies, including one in the June 11 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, show are not useful for patients with stable coronary artery disease (CAD). The mounting evidence that angioplasty is not more effective than medication treatment alone in preventing heart attack and death in people with stable heart disease doesn’t stop doctors from performing them.

In this procedure doctors put in a guideline in the coronary arteries and blow up a balloon that flattens plaque against the wall of the artery and opens up the artery or they insert a stent to keep the artery open. Sound good and makes sense, too bad it doesn’t work.

“There are people in the cardiology community who don’t believe the results. They don’t believe it applies to the patients they see,” Dr. Judith S. Hochman, director of the Cardiovascular Clinical Research Center at New York University School of Medicine, was quoted as saying. “So we still see a lot of angioplasty being done without patients really understanding that it will not reduce their chances of heart attack or death.”

But I’ll give the reason why they still perform 1.2 million of these procedures every year. It is pretty simple really. Greed.

Nancy Nielsen MD, President of the AMA, opposes healthcare reform

Doctors always say things like they don’t believe the data, or that isn’t the way it is in my practice. Since they won’t believe in science, data or reality, maybe we should just play their game and use some wizadry to get them to do the right thing and stop doing these useless procedures.

When I count to 3 you will stop performing angioplasties

Or maybe one of the Obama guys should have some guts and stand up and say we’re not gonna pay for those things anymore.

[Update: see comments section for reference to acute coronary events where PCI has demonstrated efficacy and citation by Marilyn Mann which was made immediately after I posted this on June 25 which I assumed was sufficient for anyone reading this; that didn't stop a cardiologist in another blog from going on the attack and saying that since the COURAGE trial showed lack of efficacy in reducing heart attacks in stable coronary disease these procedures have declined. Even so they are still estimated to be about 1/3 which is too many and some cardiologist lately have gone to jail for performing PCI on people with little or no heart disease. So my initial statement that 25 billion dollars could be saved is not correct. It is more like, um, 8 billion.]