recently released Medicare data that reveals drastic disparities in what different hospitals charge for the same procedure.

“Medicare probably pays what is a reasonable amount of money for some of these procedures,” Potter says. “Hospitals have gone into debt, they get the latest bells and whistles that they don’t really need because the hospital across town has it so you’ve had kind of an arms race among hospitals to have all the equipment that in many cases is just a surplus of equipment, it’s a duplication of services.”