Medicare and cost-effectiveness analysis: time to ask the taxpayers.

Maintaining Medicare's affordability for taxpayers and beneficiaries is becoming harder. Although cost containment strategies have been proposed, using cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) to prioritize coverage decisions has not been among them. There is a widespread but largely untested perception that Americans are unwilling to accept limits in health care. We review existing evidence about the public's willingness to accept constraints and set health care priorities. We suggest that given the opportunity to weigh in on ethical and normative issues that surround CEA, members of the public are appropriate parties to engage in shaping Medicare's broadest resource allocation questions.