Interesting bit from Robert Berenson in the latest Health Affairs:
ONE HUNDRED THIRTY thousand pages of Medicare regulations stifle provider innovation. We know that because conservative politicians such as Newt Gingrich tell us this every chance they get. The evidence? A decade ago, the estimable Mayo Clinic added up the pages; who, after all, doesn't believe the Mayo Clinic? This nugget, demonstrating regulation run amok, even made it into the talking points that candidate George Bush used against Al Gore in one of their 2000 debates, although Bush managed to mangle the details.
The only problem is that the number 130,000 is wrong—not just a little wrong, but about 127,500 pages wrong. I know this because as a senior political appointee at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), I was selected to defend the number in a congressional hearing. In fact, most of what Mayo counted as pages of regulations were newsletters, nonprecedential payment appeal decisions, and other assorted tidbits, many going back fifteen years. Medicare-related? Yes. Regulations? Not even close.
He goes on to laud Health Affairs, now celebrating its 25th birthday, for separating fact from fiction, and acting as a watchdog. But it only does that for those reading Health Affairs. And so you have a lot of "facts" that experts and insiders know to be lies, but that get repeated anyway -- and since it's the media's "job" to repeat credible repeaters, the public continues hearing the same bullshit. Giuliani, for instance, has now seen his survival rate statistic torn apart by everyone from the Annenberg Public Policy Center to The Washington Post, who awarded it "Four Pinnochios." His campaign's response? "Asked if Mr. Giuliani would continue to repeat the statistic, and if the advertisement would continue to run, [Maria Comella, a spokeswoman for Giuliani] responded by e-mail: 'Yes. We will.'"
And who will stop them?
