But another more liberal school of thought, popularized by Obama's budget chief Peter Orszag, health advisor EzekielEmanuel and the new Medicare administrator Donald Berwick, says that the government should play a role in studying the "comparative effectiveness" of different treatment options.
EzekielEmanuel, a doctor whose brother is Mr Obama's chief of staff, wrote a paper for the Lancet, a medical journal, in which he proposed a system for determining who should be first in line for such things as liver transplants or vaccines during an epidemic.
EzekielEmanuel, a health policy expert whose brother is former White House chief of staff (now Chicago mayor) Rahm Emanuel, has an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal offering advice for dealing with one of ObamaCare's biggest impending problems: the inevitability that medical insurance premiums for the young and healthy will rise so high that it's economically irrational to purchase policies.