Take a walk down practically any major thoroughfare in the city of Boston, and you’ll be hard pressed to go more than a few blocks without running into a hospital. The cities of Cambridge and Boston have nine hospitals and medical centers between them, and a whopping two dozen hospitals are packed into the greater Boston metropolitan area.
Knowing that state-of-the-art medical help is always close at hand is probably a comforting feeling. But it shouldn’t be. The presence of so many hospitals in Boston — along with high numbers of physicians, particularly specialists — contributes to the enormous amount of unnecessary medical care that gets delivered in the state. Unless Massachusetts finds a way to limit growth in the supply of both hospitals and specialists, the state’s efforts to control health care spending are likely to be thwarted.
Comments
The argument that too many hospital beds drives up costs is not new, but again not well developed. Has the author looked to identify what number of hospital beds in Boston hospitals are filled at any one time? If a large number of beds are unfilled then would it make sense to close some hospitals? Also, has the author identified how many beds in Boston hospitals are filled by people who do not require hospitalization?
Presumably with such a prestigous title the author has normalized for age differences between Seattle and Boston. Also, for the amount of treatment out of state residents get in both cities. And it seems hard to make these claims relative to private insurers when the data used comes from Medicare. But with a title like fellow at whatever, I'm sure the author factored all that in. It would have been nice if he or she provided a link however to the data and the methodology.