I write a lot over at John Goodman's Health Policy Blog . For every original post, I also write about half a dozen comments on others' posts. I don't usually share the latter here. However, I was interested to see Dr. Goodman's take on a new paper published by the Center for Medicines in the Public Interest , an outfit which is often tagged as simply a mouthpiece for Big Pharma. Here's what I wrote: Yes, I certainly appreciated the last “dig” and I shake my head at the irony of PhRMA funding research designed to push back key elements of a law for which PhRMA lobbied and invested. I doubt that Obamacare would have passed without PhRMA’s support. If PhRMA had resisted Obamacare, the threat of Comparative-Effectiveness Research (CER) would not be nearly as great as it is today. But that is water under the bridge. IMHO, Vernon & Goldberg have written a very good paper. Deriving a point estimate from one factor in a function that has many factors is obviously ris...