Medicare Spending Has Wide Regional Disparities, Study Finds

Business Week reports:

A new study examining 14 years of Medicare spending finds that state-by-state increases vary wildly depending on how much medical care is available.

The study, released on Feb. 25 in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that annual Medicare spending increased an average of 3.5% from 1992 to 2006 nationwide, but the burden on the government program was not uniform: Nebraska's spending rose 5.3% annually over the same period, more than any other state, while the District of Columbia clocked in with the lowest annual inflation, at 1.6%.

Spending per Medicare enrollee also varied widely, from a high of $9,564 in New York in 2006 to a low of $5,311 in Hawaii. The national average for 2006 was $8,304. The reasons given for the discrepancies were not the health or wealth of a particular state's population but the amount of health-care resources available. The more hospital beds and doctors in a region, the higher the costs billed to Medicare.

It's doesn't look like Republicans cut spending on health care.