Normally I’m bored to tears reading articles about our broken health care system in the United States and how to fix it. I’d almost rather rememorize the steps of glucose metabolism—the absolutely worst part of being a biology major.

But finally someone has made the subect readable—that expert at medical prose, Atul Gawande. His article in the latest issue of the New Yorker is an insightful read.

He takes us on a tour of McAllen, Texas, the town with the most expensive health care system in the country. Here, it seems, doctors routinely send patients to surgery who might not need it. Doctors have financial relationships, some legal, some apparently not, with hospitals and other institutions that do surgery, imaging and testing. It all has the effect of funneling money into doctors’ wallets and ramping up the costs for Medicare, the primary payer in the county.

In contrast, he notes that the famous Mayo Clinic provides much less expensive care. The incentives in this system, and others like it, are set up so that doctors focus more on the patient; they spend more time with them, they consult more with specialists in other fields, and perform fewer unecessary procedures. The result is not only less expense, but radically better patient care.

As the debate on health care ramps up this summer, I’m happy that there are some people out there who devour policy papers on health care like it’s candy. For them, this might be old news. For the rest of us, Gawande makes it come alive.