Reform stands on shaky basis

By: Anita Shelburne | Daily Progress
Published: June 07, 2010

If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is too good to be true.
We wish Congress and the president had heeded this adage when it came to health care reform.
In selling his health care package to Congress and the American people, President Obama and team frequently referred to research from Dartmouth College that appeared to show where Medicare services were efficiently delivered. The research was even neatly confined to a map, shaded in beige and brown, depicting cost-effective care vs. not-so-cost-effective care.
Based on the research, Team Obama claimed that health care costs could be cut, money could be saved to pay for other requirements of reform and the public would receive better service overall.
The administration even said it was willing to consider simply cutting Medicare funding to so-called inefficient hospitals as a means to force them to match their “better run” colleagues — apparently in disregard of local pay scales, cost of living demands and other specificities.
Now it turns out that the research isn’t quite what we’d been told.
Instead of measuring efficiency, the comparisons simply measure cost, say critics who have looked more closely at the data than Congress did (“Critics Question Study Cited in Health Debate,” the New York Times, June 2).
There is no documentation in the data that one hospital is better than another — only that it is spending less. That lower level of spending could be coming at the price of quality of care.
“For all anyone knows, patients could be dying in far greater numbers in hospitals in the beige regions [of the map] than hospitals in the brown ones, and Dartmouth’s maps would not pick up that difference,” say authors Reed Abelson and Gardiner Harris. “As any shopper knows, cheaper does not always mean better.”
If they’re right, then you can probably say goodbye to hopes of health care becoming both cheaper and better under reform. Chances of freeing up money from Medicare savings to fund the high price of extended insurance coverage as required by the new law are also rendered tenuous.
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Why doesn’t Washington get it?

Reform stands on shaky basis

Share This:

More from this channel:

Reader Comments

Deal of the Day

Most Popular

Things to Do