The Boston Globe’s Nov. 15 story “A health-care system badly out of balance” was a devastating look at how bad our health-care system is and why some costs are so high.

The story detailed how patients and insurance companies pay such celebrity hospitals as Partners HealthCare’s Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham & Women’s 15 to 60 percent (and sometimes even higher) more than their less-known rival hospitals for care that reviews have shown is no better and in some cases worse. The story noted, for instance, that while Beth Israel Hospital’s patient-mortality rate was lower in 2005 than the rates at Brigham and Massachusetts General, Beth Israel and its doctors “earned 15 to 20 percent less for the same work.”

It basically comes down to a culture of celebrity and clout. Patients want to be associated with the most famous institutions, and insurers are loath to get into a fight with them about it. If insured patients had to cover the full costs themselves, of course, things would be quite different. It’s funny money — except that what it does to society’s overall health costs is anything but funny. Further, Partners has become very good at throwing its weight around.

The result is spiraling health costs, including insurance premiums, and a disproportionate share of health-industry clout by a few hospitals, with other institutions that perform vital health services scrambling to stay alive in the competition with the behemoths like Partners. That hospital group’s sharp-elbowed practices raise questions about hospital mergers in general. It’s a little like the outrageous payments to celebrity CEOs (even if they preside over crumbling companies) and sky-high tuitions at some fancy colleges — an obsession with fame over practical results.

Charles Baker, president of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, put it well in his interview with The Globe:

“The same service delivered the same way with the same outcome can vary in cost from one provider to the next by as much as 300 percent. There is no other sector of the economy anywhere in this country in which that kind of price variability with no appreciable difference in service or product can sustain itself over time.”

Quite right. Let us hope that those hoping to push through national health-care reform read the Globe story carefully.