What's driving spending differences in medical groups and what might that mean for health policy.

Over the past 20 years, much attention has been paid to health care prices and the role they play in driving high health care spending in the US.[1] This is in no small part due to the 2003 paper by Anderson et al. entitled "It's the Prices, Stupid: Why the United States is So Different from Other Countries",[2] and the follow-up paper in 2019 entitled "It's Still The Prices, Stupid: Why The US Spends So Much On Health Care, And A Tribute To Uwe Reinhardt".[3] In this issue, Mehrotra et al.[4] take on the issue of how differences in prices I at the medical group level i may contribute to differences in spending using data for the non-elderly population commercially insured by the United Health Group. With relatively limited cost sharing,[11] patients may be using other criteria to make decisions about whether and where to get inpatient and specialty care. [Extracted from the article]