When Sue Walthert, a New Zealand doctor, was informed she had a particularly aggressive form breast cancer, she also found reason to hope.
 

Under a traditional treatment regime, she only had a 50 percent chance of surviving. But a full year of therapy using a relatively new drug, Herceptin, had, in numerous clinical trials, proven dramatically effective at treating early stage cancers like hers, increasing the odds of survival to 95 percent.
 

The problem? Pharmac, New Zealand's board of medical bureaucrats who had only recently and reluctantly approved the drug at all, refused to give Walthert the full year of treatment. Instead, they offered a mere nine weeks -- a treatment period the drug's designers said would likely produce no results.
 

Pharmac claimed its decision was driven by science, pointing to a single, small-scale study to back up its claim. Walthert believed otherwise. A year of Herceptin costs $60,000. Walthert was convinced that Pharmac simply didn't want to pay.

What Sue Walthert faced was a consequence of government-run comparative effectiveness research (CER), in which patients and doctors are ignored, and crucial healthcare decisions are made by government bureaucrats looking to save money.
 

Comparative effectiveness research is an idea that's been gaining steam, and substantial public funding, here in the United States. The recent economic stimulus package allocates $1.1 billion to comparative effectiveness research, meaning that something like New Zealand's system of de facto healthcare rationing could soon be adopted here.
 

Comparative effectiveness research is often touted as a way to save money on health care. But the only way to do that is to use its results to deny expensive treatments like Herceptin. Indeed, an early draft of the stimulus bill made this explicit, saying that CER would lead to more expensive medications no longer being prescribed.
 

In other words, Pharmac's refusal to allow a full year's Herceptin treatment is a feature of the system, not a bug. Government-sponsored comparative effectiveness research saves money by providing grounds by which to deny treatment.
 

One might think that the U.S. system of private insurers might mitigate this effect. But even if the results of such research were used to withhold treatments only from patients in government-funded medical programs like Medicare and Medicaid, the results could have immediate consequences for the entire U.S. health care system -- even those with private coverage.
 

How so? As the nation's single largest healthcare purchaser, the government's decisions lead the way for private medical providers. So private insurers would likely rely on government data in order to make coverage decisions.
 

And even if they didn't, medical innovators would see their research budgets squeezed as the largest health purchaser backed out -- leading inevitably to a slower pace for medical innovation.
 

Cancer research, in particular, would suffer, as innovation regularly comes not from a single clinical trial, but from widespread, varied use in the field after initial testing is long over.
 

That's why it's critical that comparative effective research not be used to deny treatment under federal health programs like Medicare. Senator Jon Kyl, R -- Arizona, recently introduced a legislative amendment that would have prohibited comparative research from being used in this manner. The Kyl amendment instead encouraged research to promote "personalized medicine" where treatments are tailored to what works best for individuals. Ultimately, that approach is both the healthiest and most efficient.
 

Despite receiving support from Democratic Senators Russ Feingold and Ben Nelson, the amendment was defeated. But, if the government is going to sponsor comparative effective research, it's essential that a similar provision be included. It's the only way to ensure that healthcare decisions will be based on the needs of individual patients, and not on impersonal statistics.
 

Some politicians claim that cutting costs through CER is needed to keep healthcare spending under control. That's nonsense. In the best case, it shifts costs to people who paid higher taxes for "free health care for all" for years. In the worst case, CER restricts access to new drugs for seniors, people with chronic illnesses, and children with rare diseases. So everyone winds up sicker and paying more for their care.
 

For her part, Sue Walthert eventually chose to pay $50,000 out of her own pocket for a full year's worth of Herceptin.
 

No one is against getting the best value for their health care dollar. But the current approach to comparative effectiveness research is a prescription for rationing. Personalized medicine -- the right treatment for the right person at the right time -- preserves choice and improves health. It also ensures that decisions are made by doctors and patients, not by economists and lobbyists in Washington. That's what the comparative effectiveness fight is all about.