Let’s see–they have fundamentalists, but they need rubble. Roosevelt University political science professor Paul Green, reflecting on the difficulties of selling regional governance in the Chicago suburbs, at a meeting of the Campaign for Sensible Growth on December 7: “It’s a mini-Afghanistan out there, with tribal leaders.”
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Ye shall know the truth, and the truth will make you sick. When Northwestern University economist David Dranove and three colleagues evaluated the first four years of mandatory cardiac surgery “report cards” in New York and Pennsylvania (National Bureau of Economic Research working paper “Is More Information Better?” January), they found that the report cards made things worse. Instead of helping providers improve and consumers make better choices about their care, the report cards “led to higher levels of resource use and to worse health outcomes, particularly for sicker patients.” Evidently providers decided to improve their scores by rejecting the sicker patients. The authors do caution that report cards might have a more beneficial impact in the long run.
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