Health care & the Maine Experiment
"More isn't always better, Linus. Sometimes it's just more." - Sabrina (1995)
The Telltale Wombs of Lewiston, Maine
Snippets:
Sitting at a table with most of the medical transactions in the state of Vermont listed before him, Wennberg was able to see just how bizarre the distribution of care was. People in one town would get their hemorrhoids removed five times more often than people in another town only 30 miles away. Ditto with mastectomies, prostate operations, back surgery.
This was even the case in Wennberg's own town.
"We lived right on the boundary between Stowe and Waterbury Center, Vt.," Wennberg says. "And if my kids had been going to the school system in Stowe, they would have had a 75 percent chance of having their tonsils out. If they had gone to the Waterbury School - where they actually did - it was about 20 percent."
Why the differences?
On NPR.org -
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113571111&ft=1&f=1001
The Telltale Wombs of Lewiston, Maine
Snippets:
Sitting at a table with most of the medical transactions in the state of Vermont listed before him, Wennberg was able to see just how bizarre the distribution of care was. People in one town would get their hemorrhoids removed five times more often than people in another town only 30 miles away. Ditto with mastectomies, prostate operations, back surgery.
This was even the case in Wennberg's own town.
"We lived right on the boundary between Stowe and Waterbury Center, Vt.," Wennberg says. "And if my kids had been going to the school system in Stowe, they would have had a 75 percent chance of having their tonsils out. If they had gone to the Waterbury School - where they actually did - it was about 20 percent."
Why the differences?
On NPR.org -
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113571111&ft=1&f=1001