One of the dumbest trends of this decade has been to ignore the work of universities when policy makers found it convenient. It's so easy to claim that all universities have a "liberal bias," then disregard knowledge in favor of ideology.
Thus, at Rice (my alma mater), the hard work of writing the Iraq Study Group report was ignored. (The writing was done by the Baker Policy Institute at Rice.)
While you're thinking of how many Americans are going to die as a result of that, consider how many more Americans are going to die if we ignore another recent Rice report, done in conjunction with the Texas Medical Center. And how you might be one of them.
The report studied the outcomes from a particular kind of cancer surgery, the Whipple Procedure, and its inconvenient truth is that practice makes perfect.
"Hospitals and surgeons that have performed more of these procedures will have a lower mortality rate," said Dr. Vivian Ho, associate professor of medicine at BCM and the James A. Baker III Institute Chair in health economics at Rice University. "We may be better off by not allowing low-volume hospitals to perform these procedures; we should instead tell patients to go to high-volume hospitals."
Ho is aware of the possible "monopoly effect" but says the risk is worthwhile. Prices increase most when you start eliminating the first few outlying providers, and the cost hit declines if you then move to aggressively centralize. "It turns out that aggressive centralization is more cost-effective from the patient's perspective."
I can already hear the outcry. The report is biased because the Texas Medical Center is one of those huge central facilities that will be favored in such a system. But remember the simpler truth.
Practice makes perfect.
Arguing against that maxim is silly, and the numbers are tough to argue with. Is a lower price, based on the ideology of an open market, really worth dieing for?
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