Partnership to Improve Patient Care

On Thursday, I will be joining the Alliance for Health Reform to participate in a panel discussion about choices can affect healthcare and how comparative effectiveness research (CER) should be considered by policymakers considering healthcare reform legislation.
 
As the debate over health care reform continues here in Washington, you’re sure to be hearing more about CER. One of the key points in this debate is whether government-supported comparative effectiveness research will inevitably lead to centralized restrictions on patient access to care, or prevent doctors from tailoring care to meet the different needs of individual patients.
 
At the Partnership to Improve Patient Care, we strongly believe that CER can lead to real benefits for patients, leading to better-informed healthcare decisions and improved quality of care. That's why we support CER as an important element of healthcare reform, and why we support the statements by President Obama, HHS Secretary Sebelius, the Senate Finance Committee and many others that CER is about providing doctors and patients with the information they need to make good medical decisions. As stated by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), this "in the end will help us improve quality and start to moderate cost increases."  
 
While CER holds real potential for major patient benefits, it also is being discussed as a tool to help cut health care costs by restricting patient and provider treatment options. For example, Tyler Cohen said in his New York Times commentary that policy-makers are talking about "empowering an independent board of experts to judge the comparative effectiveness of health care expenditures; the goal is to limit or withdraw Medicare support for ineffective ones… If we are willing to take comparative-effectiveness studies seriously, we could make significant cuts in Medicare costs right now. We could cut some reimbursement rates, limit coverage …and place more limits on end-of-life-care."
 
This was followed on June 16 by a letter from the Congressional Budget Office, which said that for CER to generate additional savings, "providers’ financial incentives would need to be aligned with the results. For example, legislation could allow the Medicare program to limit or deny coverage for treatments that were found to be less clinically effective or less cost-effective than other interventions."   
 
We need sound, thoughtful health policy to ensure CER is centered on patient and provider needs and improves health care quality. That is why PIPC is working in support of legislation introduced by Sens. Baucus and Conrad in the Senate and Rep. Kurt Schrader in the House. These bills advance a sound policy framework to make sure CER is about providing doctors and patients with the information they need to make good medical decisions, not cost-cutting policies based on statistical averages that leave out people at the margins.