How to Cut Health-Care Costs: Less Care, More Data

Obama's diagnosis for health reform would cut costs by rewarding quality care and limiting unnecessary treatments. But one man's economies are another's lost profits

Raoul Benavides for TIME

Outside the Mayo Clinic's Gonda building in Rochester, Minn.

Ezekiel Emanuel got a memorable introduction to our haphazard health-care system on his first visit to a cancer ward as a medical student. The white coats were ordering a transfusion for a teenage girl, and since shyness does not run in his family — brother Rahm is President Obama's famously foulmouthed chief of staff, brother Ari a similarly silence-deficient Hollywood agent — he interrupted to ask why. Because she had Hodgkin's disease and her platelets were below 20,000, the team explained. Emanuel still had questions: Was there evidence for that protocol? Don't some hospitals wait until 10,000? Why 20,000? Because that's...

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