THE WASHINGTON POST Monday, March 16, 108!  
More than inflation is pushing up costs of Medicare. While itÛªs true that doctors and hospitals are charging more, thereÛªs also the added cost of new treatments and services.</br></br>For example, take a new device that permits a doctor to monitor blood flow in the brain during open-heart surgery. For years, physicians have been able to keep track of brain waves through electroencephalographic monitoring (called EEGs). Now a company has developed an attachment for an EEG machine that puts brain wave information through a computer and displays it as a series of colored bar graphs on a television screen indicating what the situation is and what it was three minutes earlier.</br></br>The screen, placed near the operating table, gives the anesthetist an immediate benchmark to see if the patient is having a blood flow problem.</br></br>There is no doubt such a device can be helpful during an operation as complicated as open-heart surgery. But is it so necessary for a patient that the government ought to include it in the services that are paid for by Medicare? If itÛªs covered under the gover-ment program, it is certain it will be employed in every operation on a Medicare patient.</br></br>A new government bureau, the National Center for Health Care Technology, has been created to review new medical devices and procedures and recommend to the Health