Word: health
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Both the House and Senate bills would set up institutes to compare the efficacy of various procedures. Proponents say the studies are essential to ending medical treatments that juice up fees without adding much benefit. But it is far from clear whether Congress would allow such studies to affect health care costs. Opponents say they are a precursor to medical rationing. Indeed, both the House and Senate bills explicitly prevent this research from being used to decide which services Medicare would pay for and how much it would reimburse...
...Many of these economists - as well as other health experts - are watching in dismay as the legislation's reforms and cost-saving measures are whittled away by powerful special interests. "It may be that the intersection between what economists consider good policy and [what Washington considers] good politics is very small," says Stanford University's Alan Garber, an organizer of the group who signed the letter to Obama...
...even the CBO acknowledges that its predictions are highly uncertain and based on forecasting models that assume that most of the bill's untested reforms will actually work. To skeptics, that seems too good to be true, especially with millions of new patients coming into the system. While families' health bills may go down, they say, costs for the government - and ultimately taxpayers - are sure to rise. "I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health care spending rather than restrain it," Harvard Medical School dean...
...that's unlikely to change. Take the recent uproar over the recommendation by a government-appointed expert panel that most women delay routine mammograms until age 50. As Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius furiously tried to distance the Administration from the recommendation, a chorus of critics declared it a harbinger of exactly the type of bureaucratic health care apportioning they fear most. Any similarly controversial recommendation based on comparative-effectiveness research would almost certainly be neutered by Congress...
...TIME's health and medicine covers...