In one of the strangest collaborations likely to appear in the New York Times for a while, Newt Gingrich, John Kerry, and Billy Beane argue that the government needs to apply the lessons of baseball’s sabermetrics revolution to health care. Statistical comparisons and evidence-based medicine will result in better care at lower costs.
Too bad the analogy collapses faster than my Detroit Tigers did this season. Baseball is a tightly controlled universe in which even the outside factors (weather, time of day, length and direction of grass, organ versus recorded music) are measured. Most of the inputs are known and quantifiable for every single pitch.
In health care, there is still debate about such fundamental variables as weight, exercise, diet, and whether people actually follow through on treatment recommendations. All of these make it difficult to actually determine the health effects of interventions.
More fundamentally, baseball team owners can arbitrage value if they use information. The ability to reap significant returns in health care based on superior application of knowledge is limited by the way Medicare – and therefore the way private insurers – pays for treatment.
Gingrich and his friends may be right that “The best way to start improving quality and lowering costs is to study the stats,” but we need to collect the stats first and that depends on rewarding firms for providing high quality at low cost.