01:00 AM EDT on Friday, June 2, 2006

It must be true, because researchers at the Dartmouth Medical School say it is. Just when all of us in the news media had you convinced that Medicare is a basket case that will be drained dry as soon as all the aging Baby Boomers get to it, along comes this Dartmouth Medical School report that says less health care is better for the elderly. Not more care, but less. If this is so, and the word gets out, Medicare may be around for a while, after all.

The scientific souls up at the school in Hanover, N.H., say that for every major illness, there's a higher per-capita mortality rate for elderly patients in the states that provide the most intense medical care. Can this mean anything other than the more health care, the more deaths?

There's no indication in the report that patients in states that spend the most Medicare dollars are better off than those in states that spend the least. In fact, if you believe the Dartmouth Medical School research -- and who among us dares doubt Dartmouth? -- the reverse is true.

At least some of this, but only some, can be blamed on medical error. If you hospitalize people twice as often, you have twice the risk of medical errors.

The Dartmouth report leads to one conclusion: The older you get, the longer you'll live if you stay away from doctors and, especially, hospitals. The government, if it takes steps to prevent the elderly from getting too much health care, could save tens of billions of Medicare dollars every year, while the aging Boomers would be healthier and living longer.

Why do I have to tell you about this? Where are the politicians and doctors willing to risk telling the old Boomers they're getting too much medical attention? And who's going to let them know about this at the Harvard Medical School?

-- Truman Taylor