Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The 2025 Employer Health Benefits Survey came out last week. Here are some key findings: Premium costs The average annual premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance in 2025 are $9,325 for single coverage and $26,993 for family coverage. Over the last year, the average single premium increased by 5% and the average family premium increased by…
CMS’s Office of the Actuary predicts that national healthcare expenditures (NHE) will increase from 17.6% of GDP in 2023 to 20.3% of GDP by 2033. The Keehan et al. (2025) paper provides more details: National health expenditures are projected to have grown 8.2 percent in 2024 and to increase 7.1 percent in 2025, reflecting continued…
That is according to a paper by Wolff et al. (2025). They use 2011-2022 data from the National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS) linked to data from the National Study of Caregiving (NSOC). Using these data, they find. …the numbers of family caregivers providing help to older adults increased by nearly six million between…
The Incidental Economist website has a helpful explainer video. The truth is that higher cost is due to both higher prices and more utilization of healthcare goods and services. It is not caused by any one stakeholder within the healthcare ecosystem. Reducing health care costs would require significant–and often painful–tradeoffs.
In the US, opioid abuse has become and epidemic. However, in the past year, there is some hope that this epidemic is starting to reverse. Opioid deaths have fallen by 16.9% in the past year. Why have deaths fallen? According to The Economist, no one is sure: One possibility is a supply shock…the amount of…
A paper by Kowal et al. (2023) does in fact measure the disparities in health outcomes. To do this, they use data from the American Community Survey (ACS), the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) and the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) to estimate differences in life expectancy (LY), quality-adjusted life expectancy (QALE), and disability-free life…
ISPOR Europe kicks off this week in Barcelona, Spain. In honor of ISPOR, I will summarize some key attributes of the Spanish health care system based on a 2024 report from the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies and the Instituto Aragones de Ciencias de la Salud. Country overview Population: 48.4 million (as of…
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) allows the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to negotiate drug prices. However, CMS can only negotiated drug prices 9 years after drug approval for small molecules and 13 years after approval for large molecules. Why the difference? Do biologic treatments produce superior health benefits for patients? This is the…
That is the title of a KFF article published last week. The results are based on KFF’s 2024 Employer Health Benefits Survey. They write: For KFF’s survey of 2,142 randomly selected companies, officials from those with 500 or more employees were asked how much of the rebates negotiated by [pharmacy benefit managers] PBMs returned to…
In the U.S., health insurance premiums are tax deductible–if paid through out of pocket expenses–but out-of-pocket expenses are not. However, there are exceptions to this rule. These include two often-used tax-favored accounts: Flexible savings accounts (FSA). These accounts allow employees to set aside a portion of their pretax income to cover qualified medical expenses; however,…