Where is there the most overspending on health care?
Miami, Manhattan, and Los Angeles are expensive. Large Eastern urban settings seem to be particularly high cost, especially those that have a lot of medical schools, like Philadelphia. But they’re not all urban areas. Eastern Long Island is one of the highest-cost places in the United States. One driver of the differences in health-care spending is the local capacity. How many hospital beds – and how many beds in major medical-center hospitals – does an area have? How many physicians? Physicians must always stay busy to keep their practice profitable. Likewise, in hospitals a bed you have is a bed you fill. And in order for hospitals to offset the cost of caring for the uninsured, they must offer more highly profitable treatments to those who can pay. They’re competing with one another to build the fanciest atriums, and they look like five-star hotels. They’re bidding up orthopedics and cardiology salaries because those are revenue centers. That’s what’s driving up the costs of America
