`A New Year and, finally, the truth. Geographic variation is not “unexplained,” as we were led to believe throughout health care reform. It is due to differences in income, poverty, illness, and demographic characteristics. The New York Times has made it official. In its editorial today about the federal government’s decision to allow states to set the standards for health care benefits, it quotes Secretary Sebelius’ earlier statement that such a change is warranted because of “differences among the states in demographics, economics, patterns of illness and the way medicine is practiced” (see Hilly Terrain, below for more). This is a sea change. Acknowledging the fact that geographic variation is not simply about practice variation but, rather, that it also reflects demographic and economic factors may finally allow consideration of the core issues of poverty and income-inequality in the development of coherent health care policy.
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Recent Entries
- Poverty, Wealth and Health Care Utilization: A Geographic Assessment
- Health Care Spending and GDP in One Chart
- Another Model Medical Home, but the Poor Need Not Apply
- The Untold Story on PBS – The High Health Care Costs of Poverty
- The Truth About Variation – A Sea Change
- THE HILLY TERRAIN OF HEALTH CARE
- Readmissions and “Ill-incentivized Health Care”
- Wall Street Protests, Income Inequality and the High Costs of Health Care
- Finally from Dartmouth: More is More
- Reassessing Dartmouth’s Geographic Variation
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Links
- Action for Better Healthcare.com: Readmission legislation will harm hospitals that care for the poor
- BetterHealth.com: Geographic Variation & Healthcare Reform
- Diversity and Consistency–The Challenge Of Maintaining Quality in a Multidisciplinary Workforce
- Interview on the Medinnovation Blog
- It’s Time to Address the Problem of Physician Shortages – Graduate Medical Education is the Key
- More Is More And Less Is Less: The Case Of Mississippi
- Myth and Reality Underlying the Needed Expansion of Graduate Medical Education
- Senate HELP Committee Testimony
- States With More Health Care Spending Have Better-Quality Health Care: Lessons About Medicare
- States With More Physicians Have Better-Quality Health Care
- Weighing the Evidence for Expanding Physician Supply
