"Kurt Ullman" wrote in message
...
"Robert Green" wrote:
stuff snipped

I haven't seen any stats showing that Mcare is inherently better than
the non-governmental when it comes to expenses, %of GDP used,
etc., etc.

I don't think such stats exist because the systems are too different.

That was my thought, too, but I had to ask.

The problem is that advocates for any side of an issue can construct
reasonable sounding hypotheses that break down under even moderate scrutiny.
Hell, even the most neutral of analysts has to start making assumptions
about what various stats even mean and whether they were properly collected.
From my experience in MilMed the likelihood of health and health spending
data being accurately collected at the data input level is very, very low.
I always look at the coding sheet at each visit to the MDs and the same
procedures can be coded very differently depending on who's doing the
classifying. In fact my wife suspects a little bit of upcoding going on. I
suspect it's in the billion$. I guess I should look it up:

In 2013, that monetary loss in Medicare FFS is estimated at $33.2 billion
(a rate of 9.3 percent), in addition to almost $7 billion in Medicare
Advantage, $1.4 billion in the Part D drug program and $13.5 billion in
Medicaid, totalling some $50 billion.

http://www.healthcarepayernews.com/c...ates-grew-2013

Oy!

--
Bobby G.
Don't just TALK about bikinis:
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...UTF-8&tbm=isch

(Question for PC geeks - how can you make the URL for the above search as
compact as possible? - I've already removed some junk from the original but
in the old days you could just write www.google.images/whatever and now the
URLS are so long AIEO chokes on them and yes, Tiny URL, etc. - I still
prefer to quote a straight-up URL)