We’re almost at the point that you know exactly what any study from the Dartmouth group is going to find before it’s published. Following the assessment last year that showed that the nations “Top 100” hospitals show a wide variety of difference in procedures in their ICUs, for no apparent difference in outcomes, the same result comes up again.  This time (with Stanford’s Lauren Baker playing a starring cameo) Wennberg, Fisher et al looked at Medicare spending on patients in the last two years of life in hospitals in California and once again geography is destiny. (Health Affairs article here)

The study found that reimbursements ranged from $19,745 per Medicare patient at Redwood Memorial Hospital in Humboldt County’s Fortuna to $88,661 at Garfield Medical Center in Monterey Park in the San Gabriel Valley

Sacramento was cheaper than the Bay Area which was in turn cheaper than Los Angeles.  And of course the outcomes were similar in all places and had little relation to the costs. Interestingly, hospital chain is also a predictor. Sutter, which isn’t exactly known by California’s health plans as being a low cost operator, did way less than Tenet. (although I don’t know if Redding Medical Center skewed the data by itself!)

Medicare spending was also higher in some large hospital systems. Sutter Health, which operates 27 hospitals in Northern California, spent $30,814 on average per Medicare patient in the last two years of life, compared with $46,323 at Tenet Healthcare Corp.

Given that these are the most expensive patients (the 10% that cost 50% of all dollars), and moreover “it’s my money dammit”, you’d think that our so-called conservative leaders would be seizing on this to try to do something about the practice variation problem. But it just seems to be accepted as some type of unintelligent design.