Dartmouth authors overestimate potential health cost savings

The Concord Monitor runs a Washington Post column from Richard Cooper questioning a Dartmouth study showing that savings and Medicare and Medicaid could pay for health care reform.

The Dartmouth Atlas Project uses Medicare data to assess how health-care resources are distributed throughout the United States. Dartmouth has long maintained that "Medicare spending is closely correlated with overall spending," as it argued in the journal Health Affairs last year.

Later, in rebutting an article I published in the same journal, Dartmouth officials asserted that "Medicare accurately measures what doctors and hospitals do." But officials at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who have the responsibility for these data, have written in the same journal that "Medicare spending does not explain much of the variation in total per capita health care spending."