People with a drug-coated stent seemed unusually vulnerable to blood clots in later years. The new stents solved one problem, but they may have created another.

This supports Robin Hanson's view that beneficial medicine is offset by harmful medicine.

Also, some bad news for David Cutler and other proponents of pay for performance. The Washington Post reports,

The study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Medicine found that going to a hospital that scored well on Medicare-mandated quality measures did not significantly reduce a patient's risk of dying.

CATEGORIES: Economics of Health Care

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Robert Schwartz writes:

What I get out of this is that we need some form of rationing. Either we have the government ration health care through panels of experts who set standards of practice, or we go to a real free market system where customers ration by spending cash out of their own pockets. The current system where almost everybody gets to spend somebody else's money, without a rationing mechanism, is going to send us to the poorhouse.

Posted December 13, 2006 11:28 PM

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