Scott Gottlieb has a good piece in The Morning Consult about how PCORI has morphed into a bloated grant giving agency with no function or purpose.
Scott commends the leadership of PCORI in trying to make the agency functional and focused and points out that, like much of Obamacare, PCORI's lofty mission to be a key part of his (the president's )purported goal of lowering healthcare costs was never to be realized. PCORI was, like much of Obamacare, a poorly conceived idea developed by social scientists who believe the government can micromanage every aspect of healthcare. And once it can't, well at least the same social scientists can get about $3 billion of money to support some more bland and useless research that will serve as the basis for yet another round of misguided social engineering.
In fact, PCORI was supposed to be like the UK's NICE.. An agency that used CER to bring health care costs to heel by rationing care. To survive politically, the PCORI leadership quickly abandoned that objective and is focusing on grants that study how to include patients in patient centered research. The real CER -- personalized medicine -- is not even funded for a variety of reasons not the least of which is that the PCORI staff deeply believe that central planners armed with patient-centered research on how to study patient-centered outcomes in a patient centered way using patient centered endpoints will do a much better job than point of care molecular diagnostics that capture and share gene expression data..
Gottlieb concludes: "will PCORI fulfill its lofty mission? Truth be told; it was never meant to. The gauzy rhetoric about an agency that would take on the tough questions was just a sales pitch to get PCORI through Congress. The agency’s undersized grants, its bureaucratic structure, and its pious mission were always going to frustrate its ambitions. Feel stressed by all this? Don’t worry. PCORI is studying that."
You could fund a lot of great research on cures for $3 billion. Here's for getting rid of PCORI and using the money for real medical science.
PCORI’s Efforts Could Leave Obamacare Boosters Stressed Out
