By law, CMS is prohibited from doing cost-effectiveness analysis, but as The Legal Pulse has previously noted, the ethic of factoring cost into coverage decisions permeates the agency to the point where its employees have conducted their own, independent research on thecost of certain drugs.
Already, early studies of potential revenues from road pricing confirm what traditional cost-benefit analysis has long shown: that the gains from many road schemes (unlike those from many rail schemes) far outweigh their costs.
Priorities and clinical strategies should be set by medical experts based on scientific evidence and costanalysis, and those decisions need to be insulated fromthe kinds of financial incentives and disincentives that special interest groups exert.