Explore the relationship between Medicare spending and health, using the proportion of the state's population with diabetes as a proxy for general health. In general, the healthier the state, the less it spends on Medicare. States with poorer health my not be able to reduce costs simply by changing Medicare practices to those in low-cost states. Mouseover the circles on the scatterplot to see each state's prevalence of diabetes and the dollar amount spent on each Medicare beneficiary.

Read the full paper,Why the Geographic Variation in Health Care Spending Can't Tell us Much about the Efficiency or Quality of our Health Care System, presented at the Fall 2014 Conference on the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA) by Louise Sheiner