WASHINGTON, DC – At a Senate Finance Committee hearing on the nomination of Dr. Sherry Glied to be an Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), Senator Roberts today expressed his concerns regarding the Administration’s support for rationing of health care to contain costs.

 Senator Roberts made the following remarks at the hearing:

 “Dr. Glied, In your book Chronic Condition you seem to agree with the rationing approach. You speak approvingly of health care rationing via waiting lines and other tactics that ultimately delay and deny access to care.

 “Now, we know that the government already rations health care. It’s a fact that despite all of the current denunciations of private insurers for denying coverage for medical claims, it was actually Medicare that had the highest percentage and largest number of denied medical claims in 2008. Not to mention Medicare’s payment policies for providers that pay doctors only 80 percent and hospitals 70 percent of commercial rates and Medicaid is even worse!

 “But now the government has a new policy with which to ration health care. It’s called Comparative Effectiveness Research, or CER. As you know, CER is research that compares the effectiveness of two or more treatments for the same condition.

 “As I’ve said countless times before, I am not against the idea of CER nor am I against the advancement of medical science. However, I firmly believe that, absent some very strict patient protections, CER can and will be used to support rationing decisions, just as it has been in the United Kingdom.”

 Senator Roberts questioned the nominee about how the billion dollars in the stimulus bill for CER will be spent. Roberts remains concerned that the law contained no directions or restrictions on how that money was to be used, and has no patient protections against rationing.

 Senator Roberts and Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) have introduced a bill called the “PATIENTS Act” to prohibit the Secretary of Health and Human Services from using data obtained from Comparative Effectiveness Research to deny coverage for health care services and to ration health care in federal health programs.

 “We’ve tried to get these commonsense protections for patients into every imaginable moving vehicle,” Roberts said. “I myself had very spirited discussion in both the HELP and Finance Committees’ markups of health care reform as to whether this Congress would protect patients from rationing by prohibiting the Secretary from using CER to deny their care. But we have been blocked by the majority at every turn.”

 Senator Roberts is a member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and the Committee on Finance.

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