As Modern Healthcare notes: “Many drugs, devices and procedures may have been proven effective in the clinical trials …submitted to the FDA. But after they are widely deployed by physicians and hospitals outside that carefully controlled trial environment, they {often} don’t achieve the same outcomes. Sometimes they perform worse than cheaper alternatives already on the market or do more harm to patients.”
Complaints about the poor performance of pricey, heavily marketed and sometimes perilous new medical stuff had for a long time mostly been limited to consumer advocates. But now they’re getting a long-needed more skeptical look. That’s driven in part by the flood of ailing and aging Baby Boomers into the maw of the healthcare sector. The country simply cannot continue to spend at the rate it has been spending.
