More Care, Lower Cost  February 1, 1999  Judith Zwolak  A study
by a Tulane researcher says medical prices aren't rising as much
as people tend to think. "Most people think that the price of
medical care is rising because health insurance premiums keep
going up," says Dahlia Remler, assistant professor of health
systems management and a researcher at the Institute of Health
Services Research at the School of Public Health and Tropical
Medicine.  "But to an economist, that's not right. When you say
prices are rising, you should be talking about the price of the
same set of goods."  Medical care now is vastly different than
it was in the past, making the actual cost of care slightly less
expensive than a decade ago, Remler and her fellow authors argue
in an article published in November's issue of The Quarterly
Journal of Economics. Using 11 years of data on treatment of
heart attacks at a major teaching hospital and from national
Medicare records, Remler and her co-authors--David Cutler and
Joseph Newhouse, bo