This is by far, the best article that I have read about health care in America: McAllen, Texas and the high cost of health care. While the article is long, it is worth reading the whole thing. The author, Dr. Atul Gawande, compares and contrasts two counties in Texas -- both provide roughly the same level of care to its citizens, but one spends twice as much as the other.
Dr. Gawande conducts interviews, collects data, and basically figures out why one county is spending two times the money as the other. Finally, he gives us a prescription for how to fix the system:
"Instead, McAllen and other cities like it have to be weaned away from their untenably fragmented, quantity-driven systems of health care, step by step. And that will mean rewarding doctors and hospitals if they band together to form Grand Junction-like accountable-care organizations, in which doctors collaborate to increase prevention and the quality of care, while discouraging overtreatment, undertreatment, and sheer profiteering."
What's amazing about this article is that it completely reframed the debate on heath care for me. It's no longer about socialized medicine, private spending accounts, or any other of the talking points going around in the news. Now it's all about how can we build more systems like the Mayo Clinic, saving our health, and our country, in the process.
-Andy.
(Via Matt Thompson.)
