In a New Yorker article this week, Atul Gawande revisits McAllen, Texas. In 2009, Gawande pointed out that Medicare spent about $7,000 more per person annually than the national average in McAllen, sparking a flurry of activity to figure out what was behind the high spending and ultimately leading to efforts that dramatically reduced it.
The findings from subsequent research on spending trends throughout Texas, for private health insurance as well as Medicare (including several Commonwealth Fund–supported studies), demonstrate a key lesson: to be effective, efforts to contain health care costs need to be grounded in local conditions.
Read more about it here.
Read the Atul Gawande article “Overkill” here.
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