17.9%
of the GDP
52%
of adults in worse health worry about medical bills
79
(comparable countries average 82)
-21%
from 2010 to 2015
A study in the June 2015 issue of Health Affairs comparing wages of health sector employees to those of similarly qualified workers in other sectors found that although healthcare workers are paid only slightly more on average than their counterparts …
Recently released economic data suggest that, after a period of historically low health care spending growth, growth rates have started to increase.
The latest figures from the Quarterly Services Survey (QSS), conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, estimate that health …
While there are widely agreed upon ways to measure spending on healthcare, measuring the quality of care delivered is a more difficult undertaking with less consensus on the best metrics and less systematic data available. Simple measures of health outcomes …
A new analysis of trends in utilization of high-cost medication indicates that among patients spending the most on prescription drugs, most are using specialty drugs. Express Scripts’s new findings follow its March 2015 report of a 13.1% jump in prescription …
As a small portion of the population accounts for a significant share of healthcare spending, many efforts to reduce costs focus on this group of “high utilizers.” The thought is that, while much of their spending is likely unavoidable, this …
A panel of experts convened by the National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI) recently released a report addressing the issue of limited competition in private healthcare markets in the U.S.
According to the NASI Panel on Pricing Power in Health …
In its latest report, Vital Signs: Core Metrics for Health and Health Care Progress, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) Committee on Core Metrics for Better Health at Lower Cost proposes a set of core measures intended to promote understanding and …
A new report from the Urban Institute examines how national health expenditures projections from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) have changed in recent years as spending growth has slowed. The Urban analysis points out that the current …
Health spending is very concentrated among a small portion of the population, with 50% of spending focused on the top 5% of spenders in any one year.
With so much spending concentrated among a few very sick people, efforts to …
Although pharmaceutical spending growth has shown signs of picking back up in 2014, it had slowed considerably during the post-recession period (2009-2013) and was one of the primary contributors to the recent health spending slowdown, according to a recent Health …
