The Obama administration would control costs by creating a new Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research to determine which treatments are deemed most effective and thus eligible to be paid for by government. These decisions would be based on statistical averages that cannot take into account specific facts of individual patients.
Yet good physicians must consider precisely these specifics when treating their patients. If you are suffering from abdominal pain due to gallstones, who should decide whether medication or surgery would be more effective for you?
The doctor who has felt your abdomen, listened to your heartbeat, and knows your drug allergies? Or the bureaucrat who got his job by telling the right joke to the right person at the right Washington cocktail party?
We don’t need czars, “health,” cars,” “drugs” or otherwise, period. Last time I checked, this was America, not Russia.
This recent (in the past couple decades) appetite in the American body politic for czars is just another sign of incipient fascism. As Paul notes, we aren’t (yet) serfs in need of a czar, even if the left is intent on making us that way.
Here are some related thoughts from James Capretta:
Opponents of market-based reform plans like to cite USA Today-type stories to discredit the whole concept of ownership, consumer choice, and competition in health care. But, in reality, the article again points to the need for a systematic reform which would give individually-purchased insurance the same tax advantage as now provided to employer-paid premiums. That change by itself would give the individual market the size and scale it needs for more stability. And then the competition which consumer choice provides would entice lower cost, higher quality products into the market as well. Over time, the financial advantages enjoyed by today’s dominant employer-based plans would give way to the security of owning stable insurance that can be kept even as job circumstances change.
Health insurance is another area in which politicians screw up the market, and then demand more (and more damaging) intervention to fix the problems caused by the screwing up, while blaming an unfettered market that didn’t exist.
Given that I tend to pronounce acronyms as words rather than by spelling them (which is why I say “earl” rather than you-are-ell”), the only way I can think of to improve the name of this council is by replacing “Coordinating” with “Unifying” or “Underwhelming” or some such.