February 4th, 2008
Vendors confront comparative effectiveness threat
Health care vendors are beginning to react to the vogue for comparative effectiveness, and they’re alarmed.
The Advanced Medical Technologies Association has issued its first press releases and newspaper commentaries against CE, calling it cookie-cutter medicine which will deny patients the care they deserve.
Here’s what AdvaMed President Stephen J. Ubl (right) wrote to the Kansas City Star:
I have yet to meet an “average” patient, and when you consider the factors such as gender, race, complications, co-morbidities and others, you begin to see that limiting patient access to care based on averages is not sound policy, let alone sound health care.
Population studies are fine for dealing with the causes and course of disease, but don’t you dare use them to make policy, because that’s interfering with the precious doctor-patient-(vendor) relationship.
Ubl has also been expressing these concerns directly to Congress, and the message has been getting through.
The Senate recently passed an FDA reform bill which leaves the present relationship between the industry and its regulators intact.
Ubl has led AdvaMed since 2005. He’s a former aide to Sen. Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican, and had just hung out his own lobbying shingle when he was lured back to the group. His number-two is a former aide to Sen. Edward Kennedy.
I have no doubt that Ubl’s arguments will succeed through 2008. The question is whether he might get steamrollered in 2009.
Next year’s health care reform debate is going to hit with the force of this year’s Presidential campaign, and while Ubl has worked hard to scale his organization, it gets harder from here.
Especially when your last name is also a popular set of initials for he-who-must-not-be-named.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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