I’ve already recommended Atul Gawande’s magisterial New Yorker article on health care costs, but now according to an article in a newspaper it seems that Barack Obama is recommending the piece to Senators. Of course I like to think that Obama actually learned about this stuff from OMB Director Peter Orszag who was illustrating the point with scatterplots before anyone ever put together a great piece of narrative magazine feature writing on the subject:

Long story short, high levels of health care spending are not associated with high levels of health care quality. The system is screwed up. If you want to read something longer than a New Yorker article on the subject, Sharon Brownlee’s Overtreated is also very good.

Also: Don’t you think it’s weird that I referenced “an article in a newspaper” but didn’t tell you who wrote the article or in which newspaper it appeared? Well, the newspaper article in question refers to Gawande’s piece as “a magazine article” in the first graf, and doesn’t get around to naming the author or the publication until graf thirteen, and since I have no intention of writing thirteen grafs it’ll just have to be a mystery.