Reward for Getting It Wrong: More $$$ for AHRQ

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), America's equivalent of the draconian National Institute for Clinical Health (NICE) in Great Britain, saw its budget increased multifold by the Obama stimulus plan--with a cool $1 billion in funding. Now, after getting the data wrong on women under 50 not needing mammograms, the agency is being rewarded with another increase of $640 million.

AHRQ is tasked with comparing medical treatments and coming up with the best (i.e., cheapest) method that works (sometimes and maybe even just partially, but it looks good on paper) for each disease and condition. This is called comparative effectiveness research (CER). CER lay behind the data given the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), which then issued a fiat that no woman under 50 be given a mammogram.

Of course, this was immediately denounced by every field-operative medical professional on the face of the earth, and the Obama administration just shrugged off the ban as being based on the "best available science."

One wonders which dictionary they used for the definition of "best."

Meanwhile, over at the National Institutes of Health (another government agency), Director Francis Collins, who helped mapped the human genome, worries that AHRQ has it all backwards, saying that the AHRQ and its CER approach wrongfully consider "everybody equivalent, which we know they are not."

In other words, "one size fits all" doesn't work in medicine, but it's a NICE solution for an agency charged with bending the health care curve through "scientific"-based evidence for rationing and denial of service.

A death panel, are ye, AHRQ?