A column in the NYT Upshot blog cited a recent paper in the American Economic Review about competition in the U.S. health care industry. In Health Care Exceptionalism? Performance and Allocation in the US Health Care Sector, the authors question the notion that the health care sector is too regulated and restricted for consumers to gravitate to the best providers. Looking at Medicare data, they find that higher-quality hospitals (as measured by things like survival rates and patient satisfaction surveys) have more patients and faster growth rates over time.