Earlier today we put up a guest post by Robert Berenson of the Urban Institute on the troubles with a Medicare pilot program on disease management. Here's another interesting take by Gooznews' Merrill Goozner. Merrill doesn't rule out the value of (good) chronic disease management, perhaps through medical homes, but he also shares our belief that we need a lot more comparative effectiveness research so we know how to spend our health care dollars more wisely:

To squeeze out short-run savings to cover the uninsured, government programs need to develop a strategy to eliminate some of the wasteful use of drugs, procedures and tests that now permeate the system. There's a growing consensus to set up a comparative effectiveness agency in the U.S. to combat that waste. But even this long overdue reform can run off the tracks if it isn't done the right way, an issue I'll address later this week.

Our colleague Tom Emswiler has also posted on the emerging consensus around comparative effectiveness, and he'll address it again too.