The Senate had a flurry of voting on amendments to the Budget Bill yesterday, including one extremely important vote that could have helped to stop government rationing of medical care.
Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) offered an amendment , SA 793, that would have thrown a big roadblock in the way of any plans for government rationing through “Comparative Effectiveness Research,” or CER.
The stimulus bill passed with $1.1 billion allocated for CER to compare the clinical outcomes, effectiveness, and appropriateness” of medical services. That money sets the stage for a health rationing bureaucracy.
Yesterday on the floor of the Senate, Sen. Kyl and his colleague Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) expressed their concern that CER would be used to justify rationing by comparing costs, rather than effectiveness. Sen. Roberts compared it to giving away the “golden ring” to bureaucrats.
The language of Sen. Kyl’s amendment was simple: it would have prohibited the government from denying care to patients just to save money based on CER studies.
