This Week In Government-Managed Health Care Failure

The health care bureauwonks aren't having a good week.

The Washington Post notes an early experiment with the sort of coordinated care that ObamaCare's authors are relying on for long-term savings:

A key government experiment that set out to lower costs and coordinate care for Medicare patients — now the blueprint for an innovation the Obama administration is trying to move to a national scale — has failed to save a substantial amount of money.

And here's The New York Times on Medicare's technocratic mess of a payment system:

Medicare uses inaccurate, unreliable data to pay doctors and hospitals, the National Academy of Sciences said Wednesday....In a new report, a panel of experts from the academy’s Institute of Medicine said the payment formulas were deeply flawed. The system of paying doctors has “fundamental conceptual problems,” and the method of paying hospitals is so unrealistic that almost 40 percent of them have been reclassified into higher-paying areas, the report said.

And here's MarketWatch on the government's flailing $30 billion program to subsidize the adoption of electronic health records:

Under a government-led effort tied to the 2009 economic stimulus, doctors across the nation will spend on average roughly $40,000 on software to build digital databases of patient records. But even after all that expense, few physicians will be able to send patient records to other doctors who could benefit from having rapid access to medical histories, according to interviews and government advisers.

On the other hand, Medicaid's administrators have finally decided to stop paying for seriously botched treatments like transfusing the wrong blood type or operating on the wrong body part. Progress!