Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University, put forth a modest suggestion for health care reform in a New York Times editorial earlier this month: Cowen advocates a U.K. NICE-style system that would take advantage of comparative effectiveness research to cut costs for less-effective treatments — essentially, limiting or ending reimbursement for less effective treatments.

NICE has considerable respect, even among British physicians, but most of the debate here now seems to suggest that we must separate the coverage decisions from comparative effectiveness. ACC's John Brush last month gave adifferent take on comparative effectiveness research in his post on this blog.

*** Image from Flickr (SqueakyMarmot). ***

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