As our readers already know, some parts of the country spend a lot more on health care than other parts—but don’t get better results. John E. Wennberg, M.D., M.P.H., Elliott Fisher, M.D., M.P.H., and their colleagues at the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, who have spent several decades documenting and researching this issue, have estimated that if every place in the U.S. practiced the same kind of medicine as the most frugal places, we could cut costs by as much as 30 percent and still end up just as healthy.

The prospect of such whopping savings, according to The New York Times, has caught the attention of some members of the Senate Finance Committee—the group that’s writing legislation to reform our health-care system. They’ve proposed, according to the Times,

… taking tens of billions of dollars of Medicare money away from doctors and hospitals in high-cost areas and using it to help cover the uninsured or treat patients in lower-cost regions.

As much as we admire the Dartmouth work, we don’t think that an abrupt across-the-board spending cut in profligate regions like New York or Florida is the best approach.

The best explanation for why we think this is so this comes from Robert Berenson, M.D., a health researcher and former Medicare official who commented in the Times about the Dartmouth work.* Speaking by phone from Europe, he told me, "What you end up with is that the prudent doctors are still prudent, but getting less income, and the ones who are generating excess volume are going to generate still more in the face of price restrictions."