Health Care part Who knows what.....

The health care study used by the White House to show "wasted Medicare spending" doesn't really look at results of the spending in each area, it just looks at what areas spend more or less money. Or as the NY Times article says:

But while the research compiled in the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care has been widely interpreted as showing the country’s best and worst care, the Dartmouth researchers themselves acknowledged in interviews that in fact it mainly shows the varying costs of care in the government’s Medicare program. Measures of the quality of care are not part of the formula.

For all anyone knows, patients could be dying in far greater numbers in hospitals in the beige regions than hospitals in the brown ones, and Dartmouth’s maps would not pick up that difference. As any shopper knows, cheaper does not always mean better.

Shocking, I know that the government fed us some bogus, or in this case incomplete, data to support something they wanted to do anyways. And that's not unique to Obama. I doubt GW Bush showed us the intelligence that casted doubt on Iraq's intentions. Although, perhaps he was right, if unintentionally, about Medicare Part D.