Last week's New Yorker has an article about the idea that we can lower health care costs by focusing on the neediest patients.  It profiles a Camden, N.J. doctor who took the medical billing records of the local hospitals and set about mapping the areas of the city whose residents had the highest hospital costs.  He found that one percent of Camden's patients accounted for 30 percent of the costs.  Then he approached doctors and took on their costliest patients, making regular visits and addressing all the problems affecting their health.

The article goes on to describe why finding some way to lower health care costs is such a big deal:

Yet the stakes in health-care hot-spotting are enormous, and go far beyond health care.  A recent report on more than a decade of education-reform spending in Massachusetts detailed a story found in every state.  Massachusetts sent nearly a billion dollars to school districts to finance smaller class sizes and better teachers' pay, yet every dollar ended up being diverted to covering rising health-care costs.  For each dollar added to school budgets, the cost of maintaining teacher health benefits took a dollar and forty cents.

Sound familiar?  As we detailed in our Thrive Washington report on health care, health care spending is growing rapidly, displacing funding for other priorities, including education.  For example, from 1997-99 to 2009-11, Medical Assistance payments (the largest program funded by Medicaid) increased 113 percent, while K-12 spending increased 52 percent.