Very good New York Times sentences Arlington fact of the day

“Consider Arlington, Va., our best guess for where you might be reading this article.”

That is from an excellent NYT piece on health care and prices.  The very interesting original research is here (pdf), main point is that where (properly adjusted) Medicare spending is high is surprisingly uncorrelated with where private health care spending is high.  Furthermore policy may have been encouraging too many hospital mergers.

Here is Kevin Drum summarizing the study’s results on the importance of competition.