The health and science blogs are abuzz over yesterday’s New York Times story on the Medicare costs studies linked to the Dartmouth Atlas.
The Obama administration is looking to the well-established Dartmouth studies as they try to figure out how to cut cost. So, others are looking at the Dartmouth state to see if it holds up.
Kaiser Health News offers a good roundup.
Controversy erupted across several blogs yesterday following a critical New York Times article of the Dartmouth Atlas Project, an influential body of research that shows huge geographic variations in the amount of care that hospitals and doctors provide. The Times article raised the question of whether the Dartmouth research provides a guide to quality of care, as some people have asserted. Conservative and libertarian health policy bloggers were largely silent, ignoring the debate.