New Dartmouth Results: Disparities are Getting Worse
The New York Times reports that spending differences grow wider, with no apparent effect on outcomes:
Medicare spending [in Miami] rose 5 percent a year from 1992 to 2006, compared with 2.4 percent in San Francisco, according to the Dartmouth group. Medicare spent about $16,000 per enrollee in Miami in 2006, compared with about half as much in San Francisco.
But see below.
It’s truly amazing that this continues year after year. And Medicare is penalizing the most efficent producers of care.
The probelm I have with the Dartmouth studies is exemplified by the folowup study you linked us to. What if Dartmouth is wrong? What if more spending really is better for the patients?
Everybody thinks the problem is: we are paying the high spenders too much. In fact, we are paying the low spenders too little. That’s why the high spenders have no incentive to reform the way they practice medicine.
It seems that bribery is not legal in this ellaged government of the “people and by the people” while”lobbying” is legal, which is usually a form of bribery! How hypocritical does it need to get before enough reasonably educated and some what sane adults divorce themselves from those in this deconstructing democratic republic who have been bought by what operates like a fascist trending power elite?