New York -- The State of Rationed Care?

Last week the New York State Pharmacy and Therapeutics
Committee met to discuss adopting an evidence-based medicine approach to state reimbursement practices. Except that’s not what the proponents of the measure really want. What they really want is to ration health care in New York State. Evidence-based medicine, according to the definition, is “The conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. The practice of evidence-based medicine requires the integration of individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research and a patient’s unique values and circumstances.” Sounds good, right? Wrong. Because what was being presented in Albany was what’s known as “Rational Use of Drugs,” better known as “rationing of drugs.” It’s the same drivel that the eurocrats in Brussels and Geneva have been trying to sell for years to an EU citizenry sick and tired of long waits and poor outcomes. As David Sackett wrote in a 1996 article in the British Medical Journal, “Doctors practicing evidence-based medicine will identify and apply the most efficacious interventions to maximize the quality and quantity of life for individual patients; this may raise rather than lower the cost of their care.” As a particularly pithy bit of testimony at the recent hearing put it, “The people of New York, especially vulnerable Medicaid patients, should not become unwitting subjects in this experiment, especially absent their informed consent.” Amen.