Wed 21 Oct 2009
Americans beware – This is Comparative Effectiveness in action!
Posted by Helen Evans under Cost containment, Uncategorized
1 Comment
This is yet one more warning to Americans who think that the money set aside for Comparative Effectiveness in President Obama’s stimulus package is money well spent.
The Nation Institute for Health and Clinical Effectiveness in the UK (NICE) has again denied women with breast cancer potentially life saving treatment. I have said it before and I will say it again, Governments are putting prices on our lives and if the treatments that we need are considered to be too expensive then we are expendable.
You do understand that the article you linked to has absoultely nothing to do with comparative effectiveness?
According to the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality, comparative effectiveness is defined as: “A type of health care research that compares the results of one approach for managing a disease to the results of other approaches. Comparative effectiveness usually compares two or more types of treatment, such as different drugs, for the same disease.”
http://effectivehealthcare.ahrq.gov/tools.cfm?tooltype=glossary&TermID=118
This means that the money set aside by the Obama stimulus package is meant to analyze which treatments work best. This should ideally allow practioners to prescribe treatments that are most effective and eliminate those which can comparatively be costly and less effective.