Quote Originally Posted by Thondalar View Post
What you're saying is true, what you're not realizing you're saying is that the only way these things will work with each other, from an economic standpoint, is death panels. Go ahead and joke about it, but it's 3) in your original post. WTF do you think it means by "most cost-effective"? It means guess what, buddy...you've paid in to this Federally-mandated Insurance program only to find out that now that you have terminal cancer you're a drain on the program and we're not going to fund your potentially life-saving treatment because you're probably going to die anyway and we're not going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a 15% chance. Crb is dead-on with his post...what this created is the insurance form of crony capitalism.
Yeah, no. Without debating your specific hypothetical (which has a hole so large in it I could drive a truck through), cost-effectiveness doesn't mean that. It does mean that if a pharmaceutical company develops a new treatment that is no more effective than current treatments but costs five times more, it probably shouldn't be covered.

This probably wouldn't be an issue if pharmaceutical companies weren't allowed to do consumer marketing like previously, but since they are, it's now important to do so.