I'm surprised to see Kevin Drum abetting this this sort of thing. There really is a difference between a technical body that leverages evidence to decide whether national plans will cover certain drugs and "an all-seeing team of Olympians who decide which medicines doctors will be allowed to prescribe." And the attempt to blur the difference between the two isn't mere disagreement, but an attempt to exaggerate the consequences of liberal policies. The danger in a genuinely socialized system is that useful innovations really will be regulated out of the market. It's a fair concern. If the government is the only payer, and it refuses to pay for Pfizer's new pill Curesalot, then nobody has access to Curesalot. But we're not looking at a socialized system, nor anything even close to it. The maximal form of oversight that's being envisioned is a technical body that will gather evidence to set down more subtle and empirically-grounded reimbursement guidelines for public programs. If Curesalot doesn't return results, in other words, Medicare won't pay for it. But that happens already. The plans participating in Medicare Part D all have drug formularies where they make decisions on what will and will not be covered. But that doesn't mean Curesalot won't be allowed on the market, or adopted by other plans.
