Never let it be said that the scientists who publish in dry, staid medical journals lack a sense of humor. That resurrecting dead patients line is the title of an article that appeared in JAMA [Journal of the American Medical Association] a few years ago, and beyond the fact that it provided me with a snappy headline, gives me the chance to post one of my favorite lolcats [again], and is cited in another article in another journal, it has no further bearing on this post.

The another article in another journal, Looking Forward, Looking Back: Assessing Variations in Hospital Resource Use and Outcomes for Elderly Patients With Heart Failure, is monumentally less gripping than, oh, the last installment of Harry Potter, or even the labels on cat food cans, but it's nonetheless an important data point in the present health care deform reform debate.

To back up for just a moment, the Dartmouth Atlas Project is a massive gathering of data gleaned from Medicare spending records over many years. Mapping the data has produced the realization that Medicare spending varies widely throughout the country. Peter Orszag, President Obama, and Tom Harkin, to name just a few personages, are all quite taken with it, and with the Dartmouth researchers' assertions that the patients in higher-spending regions fare no better than those in lower-spending regions.

If only those spendthrifts in Miami and McAllen could be made to behave more like those prudent paragons living in Minnesota, we could save hundreds of billions of $$$$$ in health care spending every year.

Not so fast, corpus breath. The Dartmouth Atlas only catalogs dead people. The researchers looked back over the patients' lives for the 6 months [and for some purposes, 2 years] before they died. Concluding that since they all died anyway [duh!], the ones who got more care [and therefore cost more money], didn't really need all that extra care [and therefore we don't need to be spending that extra money on them].

It's an attractive notion, but one of the things the Dartmouth researchers didn't do so much of was looking forward.

I had thought I lost this video but I found it in the darned camera:

At the end of the blogger outreach on Saturday, September 26th, '09, I talked to Senator Dodd on the Kucinich Amendment Protecting States' Rights to move forward on Single Payer. Essentially, Dodd refers to Senator Bernie Sanders' efforts and Sanders legislation to deal with Erisa laws and allow Single Payer in States that want to start an SP system. Dodd makes no commitment to support it, but he will look at it. Sanders had previously introduced a partial fix to the system and it was rejected in the Senate HELP committee BUT if we can get him to reintroduce it, or even a stronger fix? One possibly more sympathetic and newly minted Chairperson may have the will to twist a few arms: