Comparative effectiveness and cost reform can go hand-in-hand, as long as hospitals and health plans look first to improve efficiency in the system, rather than just blindly cutting costs across the board, suggests a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. "We can save money without compromising outcomes--if we can induce providers to cut back on cost-ineffective services and replace them with more cost-effective but underutilized services," write Milton Weinstein and Jonathan Skinner. Still, the authors acknowledge that achieving both efficiency and cost-effectiveness is no easy task. They say an equivalent to Britain's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) would work in the U.S. because of our dislike for "command-and-control" regulations. One potential solution could be a system based on the premise of paying more for higher quality. FierceHealthcare