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@Tina

You are absolutely correct.

Dick Cheney and his wife donated a bunch of money to GW for their cardiac program. Both Georgetown and WHC are transplant centers (as is Inova Fairfax), so I wouldn't worry about cardie-vascular care.

Primary and preventative care is certainly about access, but I know people with Mediciad who get treatment from GW's faculty group practice, so excellent care is available.

Cancer, however, shouldn't be discounted in this discussion. The lifetime probability for males is 44% and 38% for females. Probability of death is about 1 in 5 for both genders. http://www.cancer.org/Cancer/CancerBasics/lifetime-probability-of-developing-or-dying-from-cancer

At some point US News appears to have gotten out of the news-reporting business and into the ranking business. Thousands of pages have been written on the problems with these rankings, so much so that from time to time some schools refuse to participate in them. Other schools openly try to game the system by, for example, over counting actual teaching faculty to appear to have lower faculty-student ratios.

Besides, it is a myth, perpetuated by TV shows like "House" and ranking outlets like US News, that people who die would otherwise be alive if only they could have been treated by some sort of "super doctor." Medicine rarely works that way.

DC has a perfectly fine set of medical schools and hospitals for its population, and if you include the resources of the region, we are doing better than fine.

by dcdriver on Jul 23, 2012 6:37 pm • link • report

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