While eminently reasonable in its tone, your March 31 editorial “Let Medicare test ways to save money’’ does not tell the whole story. Of course the agency that runs Medicare should be allowed to test out ways that save money, but that does not mean proposed policies that focus on reducing costs, by cutting reimbursements, should be accepted as reasonable.

I recently retired from the Massachusetts Association for Mental Health, where we routinely advocated for mental health policies that focused on quality and patient outcomes and against those focused simply on cost. Because of reductions in many community-based treatment programs, prescription drugs have become, in many instances, the front-line treatment for people with severe mental illnesses. As a result, we were suspicious of proposals that would have restricted access to medications or, as with the proposal discussed in your editorial, that would reduce the reimbursement provided to doctors prescribing the more expensive drug.

It would be better and more economical in the long term for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to focus on quality and measure patient outcomes instead of simply steering clinicians to the cheapest pill.

Timothy O’Leary

Wakefield