On its face, comparative effectiveness research (CER) in health care doesn’t sound like a bad idea. If you’re a politician or a taxpayer, you don’t want to waste money. CER’s appeal is fairly simple: we’re going to waste less money by preventing doctors from doing things that aren’t effective, and we’re going to determine what is effective by studying it rigorously.

Yet there are problems that emerge for a number of reasons.  One significant problem concerns the details of the studies involved, and another concerns the context within which CER operates, which is ever-increasing government control of health care.