comparative effectiveness

photo: Philip Todeldano for the New York Times Part of any real healthcare reform will be improving practices in hospitals, and -- as Obama's proposed commission on comparative effectiveness would do -- identifying what works and what doesn't. Knowing what works and why people get better or not is vital to good medicine. But amid the talk on improving such knowledge as part of healthcare reform, a vital and fairly cheap way to generate some of it -- the autopsy -- is going ignored. This is too bad, as autopsies yield incredibly good information about the quality of both diagnosis and…

A key component of health-care reform -- and saving our ass from going bankrupt and sick from spending too much on lousy treatments -- is establishing comparative effectiveness measures, otherwise known as "actually knowing WTF works and what doesn't." This idea terrifies companies who don't want such objective measures. It also generates a lot of fear, partly via confusing or intentionally frightening arguments. Yet making sure we don't pay for stuff that doesn't work is key to reform -- a point made in this Times op-ed from libertarian economist Tyler Cohen, keeper of the blog Marginal…

What's wrong -- but horribly expected -- in this picture? One week the CEO of Lilly attacks the idea of a public health insurance plan because it might reduce consumers' "ability to choose, in an informed way, from all the available alternatives." The next week, PhRMA, the trade group this CEO's company is a part of, launches a campaign to undermine comparative effectiveness studies -- which would produce the data necessary for informed consumer choice. If that's not enough, this campaign against collecting actual empirical effectiveness data, spearheaded under the astroturf group…

A roundup of wonderful stuff I won't get to. Then again, many of these need no help: "Come tomorrow and sort this hell hole out. Dinner and drinks, 4 p.m. Bring wine and caviar only.". Woman emails party invitations while asleep. Hat tip: BoingBoing Obviously, the drug and medical device industry is not looking forward to independent research that compares expensive new drugs or procedures to older and less expensive treatments. Alison Bass on objections to (and spirited attacks on) the stimulus bill's funding of comparative effectiveness studies -- a subject I hope to write more about soon…