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Atul Gawande's 2009 article in The New Yorker on the wide differences in healthcare costs between seemingly similar communities, such as McAllen, Texas, and El Paso, Texas, was said to be required reading in the White House during the debate on healthcare reform. In 2010, several studies contributed data to this debate.
In one study, Dartmouth researchers found that Medicare spending per beneficiary was 33% higher in the highest-quintile regions than in the lowest-quintile regions, even when data were adjusted for demographic, insurance, and healthcare-resource variables. When a Medicare beneficiary moved from a lower-cost to a higher-cost region, spending rose, presumably not because of a change in the patient's medical status but because o…