{"id":97972,"date":"2009-12-23T09:58:05","date_gmt":"2009-12-23T14:58:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.wsj.com\/health\/2009\/12\/23\/why-its-hard-to-root-out-waste-in-health-care-spending\/"},"modified":"2009-12-23T09:58:05","modified_gmt":"2009-12-23T14:58:05","slug":"why-it%e2%80%99s-hard-to-root-out-%e2%80%98waste%e2%80%99-in-health-care-spending","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/97972","title":{"rendered":"Why It\u2019s Hard to Root Out \u2018Waste\u2019 in Health-Care Spending"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Stethoscope\"The conventional wisdom these days is that one key to controlling rising health-care costs is reducing the huge variation<\/a> in spending among hospitals — particularly given the fact that patients at hospitals that spend lots of money don’t typically fare better than patients at hospitals that spend less.<\/p>\n

But, as with everything else in health care, this idea gets more complicated when you look more closely. <\/p>\n

One of the key sources of information on variation in hospital spending is the Dartmouth Atlas<\/a>, which looks at how much hospitals spend caring for Medicare patients in the last two years of life. But that analysis doesn’t capture cases where intensive intervention by the hospital winds up saving patients’ lives. <\/p>\n

An article in this morning’s New York Times<\/a> looks at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, which scores as an expensive hospital in the Dartmouth analysis. <\/p>\n

Inspired by the Dartmouth data, UCLA and five other hospitals studied their data for elderly heart failure patients, but they looked at the living as well as the dead. In an article published<\/a> earlier this year, the reported that hospitals that spent more appeared to save more lives.<\/p>\n

“It doesn\u0092t look like it is all waste,” one of the authors told the Times.<\/p>\n

Image: iStockphoto<\/em><\/p>\n

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The conventional wisdom these days is that one key to controlling rising health-care costs is reducing the huge variation in spending among hospitals — particularly given the fact that patients at hospitals that spend lots of money don’t typically fare better than patients at hospitals that spend less. But, as with everything else in health […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":650,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/650"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97972\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}