Yesterday, during a Congressional hearing on health care reform, Rep. Bruce Braley (D-IA) challenged health care crisis denier Sally Pipes on her academic credentials. Pipes assured Braley that she was indeed a health care “scholar” who had been published in the peer-reviewed journal Health Affairs:
BRALEY: Have you published any peer reviewed treatises in a journal of economics on health care policy?PIPES: Yes.
BRALEY: Can you give us some examples?
PIPES: I’ve done some things in Health Affairs over the past and —
BRALEY: But can you just identify the scholarly journal that’s a peer reviewed journal of economics?
PIPES: Well, Health Affairs is, I think. I don’t know whether you would say it is.
UNINDENTIFIED: It’s peer reviewed.
Listen:
Searching ‘Pipes’ in the author field of the Health Affairs website yields one result — a Letter to the Editor titled ‘Piping A Different Tune.’ In the letter, Pipes responds to what she describes as a “hostile” book review of Who Killed Health Care: America’s $2 Trillion Medical Problem — and the Consumer Driven Cure:
The author of the review responds to Pipes, highlighting her not-so-academic approach to policy: “Sally Pipes’ riposte to my review of Regina Herzlinger’s book, Who Killed Health Care, offers rhetoric and faith-based posturing but little evidence. Whilst it can be intellectual fun and politically advantageous to repeat the principles of bottom-up, makret oriented health care, the practice is usually inflationary, inefficient, and inequitable.”