Has anyone heard of this? I would have thought that this would be blatently unethical. Imagine having as a pre-condition for psychotherapy the requirement of the client having to participate in a psychological experiment. Below I reproduce the first couple of paragraphs from an article/commentary on CED from the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
-Mike Palij New York University [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/296/8/988 Medicare's Requirement for Research Participation as a Condition of Coverage: Is It Ethical? Steven D. Pearson, MD, MSc; Franklin G. Miller, PhD; Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, PhD JAMA. 2006;296:988-991. Vol. 296 No. 8, August 23/30, 2006 Policy makers agree that the US health care system needs new and better ways to ascertain the risks, benefits, and costs of new medical technologies as they are introduced into practice.1-3 One central policy mechanism to develop such evidence is to link insurance coverage with a requirement that patients participate in relevant research, including registries and clinical trials. Medicare has introduced its own version of this approach, termed coverage with evidence development (CED), and has used it in several high-profile coverage decisions.4 But the policy has been criticized as coercive and unfair.5 The future of CED at Medicare and of similar approaches among private insurers may well depend on whether such approaches are viewed as ethical. In this article, we argue that CED should not be viewed as coercive because Medicare patients are not entitled to new technologies that would not receive coverage in the absence of CED. We discuss the ethical role of cost concerns in selecting new technologies to receive coverage through CED; the importance of embedding CED in a coverage decision-making process that sets explicit standards for evidentiary review; and whether CED can play an important, ethically legitimate role in balancing needs for better evidence of effectiveness with the needs and desires of patients for rapid access to new innovations. --- To make changes to your subscription go to: http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=tips&text_mode=0&lang=english
