http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/28/business/28govtest.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=diuretics&st=cse&scp=1
From the NY Times article:
Dr. Sean Tunis, a former chief medical officer for Medicare, remains an advocate for comparative-effectiveness studies. But, as Allhat showed, “they are hard to do, expensive to do and provoke a lot of political pushback,” said Dr. Tunis, who now runs the nonprofit Center for Medical Technology Policy, which tries to arrange such trials.
“There’s a lot of magical thinking,” he said, “that it will all be science and won’t be politics.”