Now the ACA was to have prohibited that. Yeah, that is what they said. But today the NY Times has a piece that says that although the ACA does not expressly state that the "Societies" are doing it on their own.
They state:
..., a visiting scientist in the ethics department at the
National Institutes of Health, said the move by some societies to
incorporate economic analysis “heralds an important shift in the way
doctors in America are talking about cost and value.”
He
said that having societies do such evaluations was better than having a
doctor make such trade-offs while treating an individual patient, which
is sometimes called bedside rationing.
Still,
it is unclear if medical societies are the best ones to make cost
assessments. Doctors can have financial conflicts of interest and lack
economic expertise.
The
cardiology societies, for instance, plan for now to rely on published
literature, not commission their own cost-effectiveness studies, said
... a professor at Stanford and co-chairman of the
committee that wrote the new policy.
They
plan to rate the value of treatments based on the cost per
quality-adjusted life-year, or QALY — a method used in Britain and by
many health economists.
The
societies say that treatments costing less than about $50,000 a QALY
would be rated as high value, while those costing more than $150,000 a
QALY would be low value. “We couldn’t go on just ignoring costs,” ... said.
So the Dems in DC are not expressly killing off the older folks they have apparently gotten certain allies in Health Care to do the dirty task for them. I have written extensively on QALY analysis and it is filled with many bias elements, especially against health older men. So do we read a message here or what?
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