The state health plan is facing a $400 million shortfall this year. Add that to the $675 million bailout the governor signed last year and the $250 million Medicaid shortfall this year and you start to wonder how well government can help this sector of our economy.
Oh, and it doesn’t get any better at the national level.
The VA makes soldiers, marines, sailors, airmen, and coasties face a dilemma:
?You fight for your country, then come home and have to fight against your own country for the benefits you were promised,? said [Clay] Hunt, 28, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan as a Marine Corps sniper.
And the data used to promote Obamacare rationing are being questioned by other academics, Medicare, and the New York Times.
Measures of the quality of care are not part of the formula.
For all anyone knows, patients could be dying in far greater numbers in hospitals in the beige regions than hospitals in the brown ones, and Dartmouth?s maps would not pick up that difference. As any shopper knows, cheaper does not always mean better.
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. Also, nurses in Houston tend to be paid more than those in North Dakota because the cost of living is higher in Houston. Neither patients? health nor differences in prices are fully considered by the Dartmouth Atlas.
The mistaken belief that the Dartmouth research proves that cheaper care is better care is widespread ? and has been fed in part by Dartmouth researchers themselves.
