Editor's Note
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| Who'll pay for that study? | |||
| Affirmative action: How do we level the
playing field?
Too much money or too many misconceptions? One thing technology rarely does is answer society's questions about health care |
July 30, 1997 How much are you willing to pay out of your own pocket for clinical research? That's the question as health planners ponder the future of funding for new thinking in health care. An article in the July 16 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association reports that in some communities an intensely competitive healthcare marketplace is associated with a dip in clinical research. Such a decline in investment in innovation could have devastating effects on the nation's ability to conquer disease and find new drugs, treatments, surgeries, and approaches to the health problems that disable and kill us. The problem can't be blamed entirely on new healthcare delivery systems or managed care; Medicare funding changes and other factors also contribute directly or indirectly to the situation. We also have to understand the problem better. After all, community hospitals were never known for doing clinical research. Could the data reported in JAMA primarily reflect the enormous pressures university hospitals have been facing? Even without knowing more about the cause of the problem, some cities and states are already expressing interest in taxing HMOs to pay for clinical research. And some experts have suggested that fee-for-service healthcare premiums be taxed, with the money going directly to clinical research. Since everyone benefits from having the nation invest in sound clinical research, it's hard for me to support a premium-based tax that would drive up the cost of certain types of health coverage. I also question whether it's fair to solely sock the HMO industry with the cost of research, as some suggest. The problem is at the core of our continuing confusion about how to pay for health care and redesign the system itself. In the past few years, we have learned how to maximize our efficiency and reduce the cost of health care so that most employers can handle some form of health insurance for their workers. But we have achieved those cost reductions without figuring out how we're going to pay for research and other key investments, like nursing education. And that could end up causing dramatic increases in future costs. The stakes are high. Reducing our investment in clinical research has a price. Barbara Bronson Gray, MN,
RN |
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| How should we pay for clinical research? What do you think? | |||
| Illustration by Malcolm Garris/PhotoDisc | |||
