As part of a panel discussion on health care costs and the drug industry, John Vernon and Joseph Golec talked about their book Pharmaceutical Price Regulation: Public Perceptions, Economic Realities, and Empirical Evidence (AEI Press, January 2009). They argue that price controls inevitably lead to a trade-off between lower drug prices today and innovative drug breakthroughs in the future. They discussed comparative effectiveness research (CER) that has been proposed as one vehicle to make sure more value is received from health care spending.