A large literature has documented widespread variation in health care spending per capita across areas of the United States without correspondingly better health outcomes. Recent work has used "mover designs" to estimate the causal impact of place on both health care spending and mortality. In this paper, we investigate whether places that increase health care spending also tend to be places that increase health. We find that they do not and discuss the implications.
Finkelstein et al. (Fri,) studied this question.