McAllen, TX, used to be everything wrong with American healthcare. Not anymore

Between writing best-selling books, operating on cancer patients, and helping fight the Ebola crisis, Harvard surgeon Atul Gawande appears to have pulled off another victory in the past year: showing that it is, in fact, possible to dramatically reduce health-care costs. A few years ago, Gawande wrote a lengthy piece in the New Yorker about McAllen, Texas: a city that spent way more than the rest of the country on health care but didn't deliver better results (sometimes, the results were worse). "The difference was that McAllen's doctors were ordering more of almost everything — diagnostic testing, hospital admissions, procedures," Gawande wrote.