The AHRQ is in the line of fire. Here ’s why you should care.

For the past 30 years, a little-known U.S. health agency has supported and produced volumes of groundbreaking research on how to make health care safer, less wasteful, and more effective. Dubbed “the little federal agency that could,” AHRQ has accomplished this feat with a small fraction of the budgets of its higher-profile cousins, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. Nonetheless, its work has often been politically unpopular and unheralded outside of a small community of health services researchers and patient advocates. Sadly, when all medical waste is somebody’s income, there is little enthusiasm in the medical-industrial complex or on Capitol Hill in allocating the $3 trillion the U.S. spends on health care more wisely or efficiently. In fact, our legislative and executive branches have periodically proposed that AHRQ’s budget be slashed or eliminated entirely. In 1994, the agency (then known as the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research) dared to publish a back pain guideline that suggested that there was little role for surgery in most patients. As later documented in Health Affairs, this act raised the hackles of back surgeons with powerful allies in Congress who were already annoyed by the agency’s association with the failed Clinton health reform plan. The agency’s budget was zeroed out by the House of Representatives and narrowly restored by the Senate in 1995 af...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - Category: General Medicine Authors: Tags: Policy Primary Care Public Health & Source Type: blogs