This Debate Needs More Adult Supervision

Here is Joe Flower, writing at The Health Care Blog:

The forthcoming fight for real change in healthcare: It will be viciousness at the top of the lungs.  It will be a scorched-earth campaign.  Its main weapon will be fear. It will be unencumbered by any actual knowledge, subtlety, awareness of history, or access to the thoughts of people who actually know what they are talking about.  Its fury will be unloaded not just in service of narrow and inflexible political nostrums, but in the service of sectors of the industry which fear that a truly efficient and effective healthcare system would cripple their profit margins. The fulminating rages across Rush Limbaugh’s radio rants, Matt Drudge’s blog, the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, and commentaries issued by conservative think tanks, all echoed around the blogosphere.

And what, you may ask, provoked this hysterical diatribe? It was Flower’s reaction to his perceived conservative reaction to $1.1 billion in the stimulus package for “comparative effectiveness research.” I’ll explain why he is wrong below the fold.

As a scientist, I’m all for research. It’s one of the few defensible ways in which government spends our money. The problem is not research. It is the Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research, which is another name for Tom Daschle’s Federal Health Board, which was to be modeled on the British National Institute for Clinical Effectiveness (NICE). But, as explained here, Nice is not very nice. It is the basis for rationing health care in Britain.

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