Report: Poorer Patients Are Subsidizing Healthcare For Wealthy

07:29

June 28, 2011

Mass. General Hospital's Ellison Building (graysky./Flickr)

02138: Cambridge. 02304: Brockton.

Demographers and data miners will tell you zipcodes are very strongly correlated to a number of interesting things about the way we live, like income, education and property values.

Turns out, they're also a powerful indicator of how much health care we consume and how expensive we are as patients. That's a new finding in a report from Attorney General Martha Coakley.

Basically, residents in one community are subsidizing the health care costs of the other. But which is which? That is the question.

We turn to CommonHealth's Rachel Zimmerman for the answer.

Guests:

Rachel Zimmerman, co-host, WBUR's CommonHealth blog

More:

CommonHealth: Poorer Patients Help Subsidize Health Care For The Rich, Coakley Report Finds

This segment aired on June 28, 2011.