Thursday, July 16, 2009

Top Hospitals

A ranking of top hospitals from U.S. News & World Report.

If it employs the same methodology as the ranking for law schools, I'm sure there's room for debate.

1 comment:

John said...

The Kaiser Family Foundation provides a ten-page PDF document comparing and summarizing the Senate and House versions of the health care reform proposals.

http://www.kff.org/healthreform/sidebyside.cfm

Do not believe anything you read or hear about this plan until you have done your own homework. The link is at the top of the screen, above the now obsolete plans that also appear below.

(I have not studied these two most recent permutations of the half-dozen or two that were introduced at the start of the session. My printer is not available at the moment, but when I finish leaving this link a few places I will go to the library where I can make myself a copy to study.)

Critics are probably correct that there is nothing being proposed to control costs. There never has been from the 1930's when Blue Cross and Blue Shield became the first group insurance plans in the country. The only way that they were permitted to come into existence was the understanding that there would not be any controls on physician charges. The country was recovering from price controls of the Great Depression and the AMA, which opposed both the Blues, only relented in return for an agreement that there be no caps on charges.

Nothing has changed since then, which is one of the main reasons for the excessive costs of health care today.