Not only can I imagine hospitals in the United States that deliver fewer than one baby per day. You would be stunned by how many hospitals in the United States deliver babies, or provide other services, at incredibly low frequencies such as one or less per day. In reality, we have a lot of waste in our system due to overhead for services like this. The real danger is that in these low-frequency institutions complication rates are much worse than higher volume facilities.

There is a lot that people don't know about our health care system, and what they don't know affects their opinions about reform. This column is a great example. People need to be more educated and engaged. If they were, this debate would not be focused on who pays (which is what this is all about), but on how we get the quality we should have in our system and, as the researchers at Dartmouth point out, how we can reduce our costs by 30% while improing that quality.