NEW YORK TIMES STORY SHOWS HOW HEALTH BILL'S EFFORTS TO CUT DOWN WHAT HEALTH CARE PROVIDERS ARE ALLOWED TO DO CAN RESULT IN LIVES LOST

December 22. The health care bill which the Senate is about to adopt authorizes the Secretary of Health and Human Services to impose "efficiency" measures on doctors and hospitals throughout the country, [1] and it changes the way health care providers treating senior citizens under Medicare will be paid – instead of getting a set amount for each test or procedure, their reimbursement will be changed depending on what "value" the government believes will come from it.

However, an article in this morning’s New York Times challenges the idea that this approach will save money without denying needed and effective lifesaving care.

The Obama Administration’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orzag, has attacked the fact that the Ronald Reagan University of California at Los Angelos [UCLA] Medical Center spends more than Rochester, Minnesota's Mayo Clinic. "One of them costs twice as much as the other, and I can tell you that we have no idea what we’re getting in exchange for the extra $25,000 a year at U.C.L.A. Medical. We can no longer afford an overall health care system in which the thought is more is always better, because it’s not."

But the Times article cites recent research showing that "[T]he hospital that spent the most on heart failure patients had one-third fewer deaths after six months of an initial hospital stay."

The Times reports:

Take the case of Salah Putrus, who at age 71 had a long history of heart failure After repeated visits to his local hospital near Burbank, Calif., Mr. Putrus was referred to U.C.L.A. this year to be evaluated for a heart transplant.

Some other medical centers might have considered Mr. Putrus too old for the surgery. But U.C.L.A.’s attitude was "let’s see what we can do for
him," said his physician there, Dr. Tamara Horwich.

Indeed, Mr. Putrus recalled, Dr. Horwich and her colleagues "did every test." They changed his medicines to reduce the amount of water he was retaining. They even removed some teeth that could be a potential source of infection.

His condition improved so much that more than six months later, Mr. Putrus has remained out of the hospital and is no longer considered in active need of a transplant.

The Obama Administration and Congressional architects of the health care bill have relied heavily on a series of studies by researchers at Dartmouth which seem to show that the greater amounts of money spent on health care in some regions of the country don’t produce better outcomes and hence are wasted. This conclusion is the basis for much of the health care bill’s efforts to use the power of the federal government to force doctors and hospitals to spend less per patient.

But, as the Times story points out, "Because Dartmouth’s analysis focuses solely on patients who have died, a case like Mr. Putrus’s would not show up in its data. That is why critics say Dartmouth’s approach takes an overly pessimistic view of medicine: if you consider only the patients who die, there is really no way to know whether it makes sense to spend more on one case than another."
　

Dr.[J. Thomas] Rosenthal [, chief medical officer of the U.C.L.A. Health System,] and his U.C.L.A. colleagues . . . say that unless the distinction can be clearly drawn between excellence and excess in medical care, efforts to cut wasteful spending could be little more than blunt rationing.

"There’s a real risk of doing harm here — real harm," he said.