Restaurant Chains Have Managed to Combine Quality Control, Cost Control, and Innovation. Can Health Care?   Physician and writer Atul Gawande publishes an essay in the New Yorker today that discusses how the Cheesecake Factory delivers good food at reasonable prices while meeting rigorous metrics (it throws away only 2.5% of all its groceries, for instance), and explores whether and how the lessons of Cheesecake Factory efficiency can be effectively applied to today’s hospitals.  Only a quarter of physicians are self-employed today, Gawande notes, which is a remarkable turnaround from only a decade ago when the majority were self-employed.  Most are…