In one panel, a stick-figure Tevis greets a constituent by rattling off a stream of personal facts he's found online about her -- including her birthdate, voting pattern, divorce, paycheck, credit card balances and medical history -- to illustrate his interest in protecting individual privacy.

When she slams the door in his face, the cartoon Tevis muses, "Maybe I should rethink my approach."

"I figured I'd raise a few thousand dollars, at most," for his bid to become a state representative, said Tevis, a computer systems manager who works for an industrial manufacturing company.

In fact, before he created the comic strip, Tevis spent weeks asking cash-strapped friends and family for help and walking door-to-door in the district. He raised $1,525.

The comic strip -- at www.seantevis.com/3000 -- was first posted online July 16. Today, when he files his campaign finance forms with the Kansas secretary of state's office, Tevis will report that he has raised $95,162.76 in donations through PayPal, the online service that allows payments and money transfers via the Internet.

My name is Sean Tevis. I'm an Information Architect in Kansas running for State Representative. I've decided to "retire" my current State Representative. I'm going to win. This is my story (XKCD homage style) so far.

In 1992, three surgeons at a major hospital here that specializes in organ transplants met in the hospital's cafeteria to informally discuss the California Legislature's effort to enact a mandatory motorcycle helmet law.

"This looks like it might pass," one doctor said. The others nodded. "This could have serious consequences for the hospital."

"How so?" asked the doctor sitting closest to him.

"Motorcycle fatalities are not only our No. 1 source of organs, they are also the highest quality source of organs because donors are usually young, healthy people with no other traumatic injuries to the body, except to the head," the first doctor answered. "Studies have shown that when helmet laws are enacted, motorcycle deaths significantly decrease. The hospital already has serious financial issues to deal with. This could put us out of business -- or at least the business of organ transplants."

...

Just then the third doctor stood up and said: "I'm a member of the hospital's ethics committee, and I can tell you, as physicians, we can't even have this conversation." With that, she left the room.

On June 18, Esmin Green, 49, was involuntarily admitted to the psychiatric emergency department of Kings County Hospital Center on June 18 for what the hospital describes as "agitation and psychosis."

Upon her admission, Green waited nearly 24 hours for treatment, said the New York Civil Liberties Union, which on Tuesday released surveillance camera video of the incident.

The surveillance camera video shows the woman rolling off a waiting room chair, landing face-down on the floor and convulsing. Her collapse came at 5:32 a.m. June 19, the NYCLU said, and she stopped moving at 6:07 a.m. During that time, the organization said, workers at the hospital ignored her.

At 6:35 a.m., the tape shows a hospital employee approaching and nudging Green with her foot, the group said. Help was summoned three minutes later.

In addition, the organization said, hospital staff falsified Green's records to cover up the time she had lain there without assistance.

Avastin is a drug approved to treat colon cancer. It works by choking off blood vessels to the tumor. It turns out, however, that a tiny dose of the same drug, when injected into the eye can also stop the uncontrolled growth of blood vessels behind the retina that produces a leading cause of blindness in the elderly, macular degeneration. The good news is a compounding pharmacy can take the large dose in the Avastin package and split it into sterile eyeball-appropriate doses. The cost is somewhere between $20 and $100. That's good news for consumers, anyway. It wasn't such good news for Genentech, the maker of Avastin. So they went about making a small modification of the drug, renamed it Lucentis, and got FDA approval for its use in macular degeneration -- at $2000 per monthly injection. Avastin is not approved for the same purpose because Genentech has not applied for approval. It's still legal to use it off label, however, and numerous ophthalmologists have been doing so to save their patients and the taxpayers' money.

Genentech was not amused. So they announced in October they would no longer sell Avastin to compounding pharmacists.

One of the most ridiculous ideas to come down the pike is the notion that most people, who are woefully ignorant of medicine and biology (e.g., the massive misunderstandings a out antibiotics and infectious disease), will actually make intelligent decisions regarding their own healthcare. In fact, I bet most people would do worse than flipping a coin in many situations. That's before you get to the roughly twenty percent who are functionally illiterate.

This probably sounds elitist. And you're right, it is elitist. Because, as Atrios notes, medical doctors are part of an elite group of people who have extensive experience and training in medicine, which most people lack. While trying to 'puzzle out' your healthcare treatment options isn't quite as stupid as trying to puzzle out how to build a nuclear reactor, it's still pretty stupid.

Baghdad's hospitals are poorly equipped, lack medicine and equipment, are frequently overcrowded and have too few nurses and doctors to care for the patients. Many of them are also dirty, and I have had doctors tell me that they always advise patients to go home if they possibly can to avoid becoming sicker. While Iraqi doctors are often quite good, and some younger doctors have gone to sessions held by groups like Doctors Without Borders, most have had little access to training in the last five years and are working with antiquated equipment.

...

Medicines are of questionable quality and often outdated. Basic antibiotics are available, but most ills are treated with broad spectrum drugs rather than drugs tailored to the particular illness. For high blood pressure, a common complaint, doctors often prescribe diazepam (Valium) and little else. Diabetes is hard to treat because it is difficult to get steady supplies of insulin. These are just a few examples, there are many more.

How can we help them win the war on terror if we can't help them win the war for basic healthcare?

Prozac, the bestselling antidepressant taken by 40 million people worldwide, does not work and nor do similar drugs in the same class, according to a major review released today.

The study examined all available data on the drugs, including results from clinical trials that the manufacturers chose not to publish at the time. The trials compared the effect on patients taking the drugs with those given a placebo or sugar pill.

When all the data was pulled together, it appeared that patients had improved - but those on placebo improved just as much as those on the drugs.

The only exception is in the most severely depressed patients, according to the authors - Prof Irving Kirsch from the department of psychology at Hull University and colleagues in the US and Canada. But that is probably because the placebo stopped working so well, they say, rather than the drugs having worked better.

The first, much-anticipated benefits of personalized medicine are being lost or diluted for many Americans who are too afraid that genetic information may be used against them to take advantage of its growing availability.

In some cases, doctors say, patients who could make more informed health care decisions if they learned whether they had inherited an elevated risk of diseases like breast and colon cancer refuse to do so because of the potentially dire economic consequences.

Others enter a kind of genetic underground, spending hundreds or thousands of dollars of their own money for DNA tests that an insurer would otherwise cover, so as to avoid scrutiny. Those who do find out they are likely or certain to develop a particular genetic condition often beg doctors not to mention it in their records.

I'd like to address a few of the larger assumptions that Americans make about health care that are contradicted by the Canadian example; and in the process offer some more general thinking (and perhaps talking) points that may be useful in the debates ahead.