Today’s New York Times tries to tell a story at the very center of what is shaping up as a stormy debate over just how much waste there is in our healthcare system. But while striving to be even-handed, the Times quotes both informed and uninformed sources—sometimes taking informed sources out of context—and in the process, makes hash of the facts.
The Times begins by reporting that the New Yorker article that I wrote about last week “has become required reading in the White House.” This story, by Dr. Atul Gawande, describes pricey and potentially harmful overtreatment of patients in McAllen, Texas, where Medicare spends more, per capita, than in any other town in the country. The data behind the story comes from more than two decades of Dartmouth research showing “widespread and unwarranted variations” in how much care very similar patients receive in different parts of the country.
The Times explains that the Dartmouth research focuses a “problem that intrigues the President very much . . . the huge geographic variations in Medicare spending per beneficiary.” What’s shocking is that “the higher spending does not produce better results for patients.” The paper goes on to quote Senator Ron Wyden (D. Oregon): The president “came into a [recent] meeting with that article having affected his thinking dramatically. He, in effect, took that article and put it in front of a big group of senators and said, ‘This is what we’ve got to fix.’”