A doctor who recently returned from a trip to Syria has condemned the “destruction of the Syrian health system” and attacks on medical staff.

Zaher Sahloul, president of the Syrian American Medical Society and a doctor in Chicago, told a meeting convened to discuss attacks on health facilities in Syria about the fear under which many doctors work.

“There has been systematic destruction of the healthcare system. The situation is very bad, and doctors caught treating patients from the other side [the opposition] risk their life. Many physicians have been detained, tortured, or killed,” he told the meeting at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, which was webcast to journalists around the world (http://bit.ly/13epyYw).

His most recent visit was to the city of Aleppo, which has a population of more than two million. “There are no CT [computed tomography] scanners, only 10 incubators, and 10 dialysis machines. They’re running out of saline intravenous solution, and oral antibiotics are not available,” he said.

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A simple idea: attack Obamacare tersely.

On the same day House Republicans scheduled their latest symbolic vote to repeal Obamacare, as part of their full-court press against the law they also took to Twitter to say, in three words, why they oppose the legislation.

Speaker John Boehner led the GOP tweet slaps that used the trending hashtag #ObamaCareInThreeWords: “Repeal for jobs” and “Scares small businesses” showed up on his timeline.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor attacked with a fusillade of his own tweets:

“Run by IRS,” “21 Tax Hikes” and “2000 IRS Agents” were a few that surfed on the wave of public outrage at the Internal Revenue Service for allowing some employees to target for greater scrutiny conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.

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The information allows drug makers to know which drugs a doctor is prescribing and how that compares to a colleague across town. They know whether patients are filling their prescriptions — and refilling them on time. They know details of patients’ medical conditions and lab tests, and sometimes even their age, income and ethnic backgrounds.

The result, said one marketing consultant, is what would happen if Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman met up with the data whizzes of Michael Lewis’s “Moneyball.” “There’s a group of geeks, if you will, who are running the numbers and helping the sales guys be much more efficient,” said Chris Wright, managing director of ZS Associates, which conducts such analyses for pharmaceutical companies.

Drug makers say they are putting the information to good use, by helping a doctor improve the chances that their patients take their medications as prescribed, or making sure they are prescribing the right drug to the right patients.

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