The scheme was cooked up last November in Washington, DC. And the entity would be modeled after the Uk’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, or NICE, which rejects drugs that are deemed ineffective and also bargains with drugmakers over pricing. Australia and Canada do something similar.

The US version that is being floated about is referred to as a Comparative Effectiveness Board, which would review the evidence on how well drugs work, whether they are cost-effective and, iIf necessary, carry out its own clinical trials.

“There are cultural differences about how the role of government is viewed, and most Americans tend to be on the side of ‘less government’,” Steve Pearson of Harvard Medical School and a key proponent of the CEB, tells The New Scientist. “But that’s starting to change, as people have problems affording healthcare, and something has to give.”

The idea, CEB advocates say, is to break the pharmaceutical industry’s stranglehold on drug prices and stop it from peddling marginally effective medicines. Not surprisingly, drugmakers are unhappy with the idea of a government body judging the value of drug based on money.

“We support approaches to evidence based medicine and medical decision making and we understand the issues that Nice is trying to address but there are some very good examples in the UK and Australia that show when you set out to do this at the Government level some groups of patients will suffer,” Randy Burkholder of the Phrma trade group tells PharmaTimes World News. “We don’t think a central rationing body would fit in with the patient-centred approach of the US healthcare system. And it’s the lower-income patients in the public healthcare system who would suffer.”

The entire piece in The New Scientist is worth reading and, if the proposal gains any traction at all, is certain to cause an interesting debate. After all, who wouldn’t want the most effective medicine at a reasonable price?

[tags]NICE, Phrma, Prices, UK[/tags]