Countering the Attack on Medicare

Once the Affordable Health Care Act of 2010 was enacted, government leaders began the push to reduce the cost of the program. Their main focus is to reduce care and treatment, claiming much of it is unnecessary and doesn’t provide benefits. But they might not be using the best analysis and studies to decide the care they’re going to cut. Take a look at this article from The Wall Street Journal. It argues that the government is accepting the results of flawed studies in order to reduce the care available to older Americans. Here’s an example of the arguments that are being used:

So should medical resources be reserved for younger patients? That’s an ethical issue. But research should not be rigged to prove that withholding care is harmless. Yet such flawed research is driving our political debate.

President Barack Obama’s former budget director, Peter Orszag, told reporters in June 2009 that the president’s plan to cut future Medicare funding would not be dangerous. He said that spending could be lowered by about 30%, to approximate what is spent in the lowest-cost regions of the country, without doing harm.

Mr. Orszag cited the Dartmouth Atlas of Healthcare 2008, which tried to prove that Medicare patients who got less care (fewer hospital days, doctor visits and imaging tests) had the same outcomes as patients who received more care. But the Dartmouth investigators had pulled the same trick as the Lancet investigators: They examined only the records of patients who died. By definition, such patients—regardless of their level of care—ended up the same: dead.