Jerry ElprinHealth Care
April 27, 2017
With all the news and talk these days about health care costs and who pays for what, I’ve taken more of an interest in what we as a country spend and who pays…the big picture so to speak.
My curiosity was sparked by two articles I came across that cited the findings of a study led by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Using data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services National Health Expenditure Account, the study looked at estimated spending for 155 separate conditions.
The results, as published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, put total estimated U.S. spending on both public and personal health care at $2.9 trillion in 2014. That’s 17 percent of the entire U.S. economy (and more than $9,110 per person).
According to the study, a third of the total was paid by private health insurers. Medicare and Medicaid paid for 37 percent, DOD and the VA paid 3 percent, third party payers paid 11 percent, and 11 percent were “out-of-pocket” expenses.
Citing the same study, a Washington Post article by Carolyn Y. Johnson, proclaimed “Chronic diseases drive health spending.” In it, she reports that chronic – and often preventable – diseases were responsible for the largest share of personal health spending in 2014, led by diabetes ($101 billion), heart/coronary artery disease ($88 billion) and back and neck pain ($88 billion). She also notes that 39 percent of this spending was for people 65 and older.
Yet another article in the Washington Post — “Should the healthy pay for the sick?” by health care economist David Cutler — claims that 84 percent of medical spending is for the 50 percent of people with at least one chronic disease. And half of that is for the 16 percent with three of more chronic conditions.
In my own case, the largest share of my wife’s and my health care expenses last year – about 40 percent — went for Medicare and medi-gap insurance premiums. And thanks to that insurance, our medications came to only about 4 percent of our out-of-pockets expenses for deductibles and co-pays, including dental care. What do you spend?