"History is a wonderful thing, if only it was true"
-Tolstoy

Tuesday, June 08, 2010

Like I'm suprised

Data Used to Justify Health Savings Effort Is Sometimes Shaky - NYTimes.com:

"Even Dartmouth’s claims about which hospitals and regions are cheapest may be suspect. The principal argument behind Dartmouth’s research is that doctors in the Upper Midwest offer consistently better and cheaper care than their counterparts in the South and in big cities, and if Southern and urban doctors would be less greedy and act more like ones in Minnesota, the country would be both healthier and wealthier.

But the real difference in costs between, say, Houston and Bismarck, N.D., may result less from how doctors work than from how patients live. Houstonians may simply be sicker and poorer than their Bismarck counterparts."

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