Study Misused to Expedite ObamaCare Passage

Study Misused to Expedite ObamaCare Passage

“In selling the health care overhaul to Congress, the Obama administration cited a once obscure research group at Dartmouth College to claim that it could not only cut billions in wasteful health care spending but make people healthier by doing so,” write Reed Abelson and Gardiner Harris in the New York Times. White House Budget Director Peter Orszag claimed the study showed that “an estimated $700 billion a year spent on health care … does nothing to improve patient health, but subjects you and me to tests and procedures that aren’t necessary and are potentially harmful — not to mention wasteful.”

“Mr. Orszag,” say Abelson and Harris, “even displayed maps produced by Dartmouth researchers that appeared to show where the waste in the system could be found. Beige meant hospitals and regions that offered good, efficient care; chocolate meant bad and inefficient.” All the Obama administration had to do was to “trim the money Medicare pays to hospitals and doctors in the brown zones,” according to Abelson and Harris, and the problem of wasteful healthcare spending would be solved.

Like so much else that passed for truth in the ObamaCare debate, Orszag’s assertions turned out to be somewhat less than accurate. The Dartmouth study, known officially as the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, says nothing whatsoever about the quality of healthcare, nor does it even address regional differences in healthcare practice and economic conditions. As Abelson and Harris write, “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