Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The annual health spending numbers from CMS’ Office of the Actuary (OACT) show that health care spending is increasing as a share of national income. A study by Martin et al. (2016) estimates that health care spending now makes up 17.8% of the U.S. economy, by far and away the largest percentage in the world.…
The answer may be ‘yes’ according to recent figures from the CMS Office of the Actuary (OACT). For the fourth consecutive year, growth in health care spending remained low, increasing by 3.7 percent in 2012 to $2.8 trillion. At the same time, the share of the economy devoted to health fell slightly (from 17.3 percent to 17.2 percent) as…
For the under-65 population insured by Blue Cross, total spending per-member-year in McAllen, Texas, was 7 percent lower than in El Paso, Texas. By contrast, Atul Gawande’s 2009 New Yorker article, which used data from theDartmouth Atlas of Health Care on variations in Medicare spending, showed that per capita spending in McAllen was 86 percent higher…