The Experts Were Wrong About the Best Places for Better and Cheaper Health Care - The New York Times

The Experts Were Wrong About the Best Places for Better and Cheaper Health Care - The New York Times

Comment from Kip Sullivan: This morning's NY Times has a delicious article on the front page
debunking the ACA's theory of cost-containment, namely, overuse is
what's causing US health care costs to skyrocket, and the solution is to
push doctors into ACOs so they can bear insurance risk. In fact, the
paper provides evidence indicating that precisely BECAUSE the ACA
encourages consolidation of hospitals and clinics into ACOs, costs are
going up.


PNHP has been trying to communicate this fact to the
Health Care Financing Task Force: Overuse and the fee-for-service system
are not the problem, and cramming doctors into HMOs/ACOs so that they
can bear more insurance risk is not the solution. I hope task force
members read this article.

The article is based on a
soon-to-be-published paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The paper shows that the overuse mavens who publish the Dartmouth Atlas
got it all wrong. They became very excited in the early 1990s about
Medicare data as computers made it possible to compare Medicare spending
region by region. By becoming obsessed with Medicare data and ignoring
data from the private sector, they convinced themselves of the wrong
solution. This is a great illustration of why drunks never find their
keys: They only look under the streetlight because that's where the
light is good.