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Genocidal Washington Post Had to Bow to LaRouchePAC's Attack on Dartmouth/Wennberg Lies

September, 21 (LPAC)—Even the genocidal Washington Post, the owners of the Newsweek magazine which entitled its Sept. 21 issue "The Case for Killing Granny," with a pulled plug on the cover, have now had to bow to the attacks which EIR and Dr. Ned Rosinsky have led against the lies of Jack Wennberg and his Dartmouth Group,— lies which underlie Peter Orszag's claim that 30% of U.S. medical costs are wasted.

In a front-page feature today on the Mayo Clinic of Rochester, Minnesota,— Wennberg's poster-child for supposedly low-cost, high-value care,— the Post was forced to cover Wennberg's oldest opponent, Dr. Richard Cooper of the University of Pennsylvania. "It's not [Mayo's] model. It's their patients and money. If you have the money, you can attract good staff, good doctors, good nurses," Cooper said. "You are going to force hospitals to find ways to avoid taking care of poor people, just because they are going to be penalized because poor people cost more."

"If 98 percent of our patients were middle-class Scandinavians and no one was poor, we'd have low costs, too," says Cooper. "What happens is that a poor person goes home and they don't have the support available that the average middle-class person has, and so they get readmitted at an astronomical rate."

The Post admits that Mayo accepts Medicare patients from outside Minnesota, only if they are willing to pay a personal premium beyond normal Medicare coverage, which boosts its income and the average socio-economic status of its patient pool. In Olmsted Medical Center, the only other hospital in the same town of Rochester (pop. 85,000), 29 percent of patients receive Medicaid (medical insurance for the poor). At Mayo, it's only 5 percent. "Why don't they [Medicaid patients] come?", said Mayo CEO Dennis Cortese. 'I don't know.'"

Mayo also charges high rates for the many people paying out of pocket. It draws so many wealthy patients from abroad that it has set up a concierge area to help translate and to exchange currencies, and a Middle Eastern sheik has built a hotel, the tallest building in town, to house patients from overseas.

"These charges, to insurers and private patients, raise questions about whether the Dartmouth data capture the full cost picture," the Post is forced to concede. Indeed they do, since Dartmouth/Wennberg consider Medicare billings alone!

Yet Dartmouth's lies are the purported intellectual underpinning of the whole of Obama's Nazi-like healthcare reform. As if to celebrate that fact, Section 1123 of the current House bill HR 3200, gives a 5% bonus to the hospitals rated by Dartmouth in the lowest quintile of cost,— led by Mayo. Cooper calls that section "the Dartmouth Honorary Clause" on his website, www.buzcooper.com

Trying to squash the criticism, "Elliott S. Fisher, the Dartmouth professor who oversees the Medicare research, published a piece in the New England Journal of Medicine stating that poverty and health status accounted for only about a third of the spending disparities among communities. 'Yes, there are pockets of poverty,' he said in an interview. 'But despite claims to the contrary, that does not explain most of the differences across the United States.'"

Ned Rosinsky, MD, has decisively refuted that lie, along with all of Dartmouth and Wennberg's other outrageous claims, in his two-article series in EIR, which appeared in the July 31 and September 11, 2009 issues.


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