SPECIAL REPORT: Are doctors what ails U.S. healthcare?

By Chris Baltimore

WHITE PLAINS, New York (Reuters) - Nowhere in the United States has more doctors at its beck and call than White Plains, one of the wealthiest cities in the nation.

Doctors have been flocking to the area and surrounding Westchester County since the 1970s, drawn in part by an upper-class clientele who demand top-notch medical care and have the means to pay for it. The county has one of the highest median household incomes in the nation (about $77,000 a year in 2007), and the figures soar above six digits in suburbs like Scarsdale and Chappaqua, which former President Bill Clinton calls home.

Nearly 3,000 miles away, scaring up a doctor in Bakersfield, situated in California's economically battered Central Valley, is a lot harder. In fact, White Plains has more than twice the number of doctors per capita as Bakersfield, where needy patients until recently had to take a 2-hour bus trip to Fresno to see a diabetes treatment specialist.

Two decades worth of U.S. healthcare data analyzed by Dartmouth Medical School at Reuters' request shows that such regional disparities are increasingly creating a nation of health-care haves and have nots.

The research also suggests that the chasm between places like White Plains and Bakersfield is likely to grow -- a point underscored by dozens of interviews with doctors and experts. That's because physicians, the data shows, gravitate toward affluent locales in the United States that already have all the medical help they need.

What's more, the Dartmouth analysis shows, clusters of doctors tend to result in higher health care costs -- and, perhaps most surprisingly, outcomes aren't any better in cities with the largest physician populations.

Congressional Democrats in late October unveiled a sweeping healthcare overhaul that would transform the insurance market, extend health insurance to 46 million additional U.S. patients and levy new taxes on the rich.