The Costs And Benefits Of Health Spending In 2015

On December 2, Anne Martin and the actuarial team at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released their estimates of national health spending for 2015. The headline news was that health expenditure growth has increased relative to prior years, and that the health care share of gross domestic product (GDP) hit a high of 17.8 percent in 2015. The annual estimates tell us a lot about growth in spending, sources of funding, and broad categories of use. They don’t, however, tell us much about the level and allocation of benefits from additional spending. Another way to consider the growth in national health expenditures is to see who has benefited from it and how. Coverage: Expansion at a Deep Discount One set of beneficiaries of higher health care spending growth in 2015 can be identified quite readily: those who gained coverage through the ACA coverage expansions that took place in 2014 and 2015. Martin and her colleagues estimate that in 2015, the national uninsured rate had declined by 4.9 percentage points and some 23 million more people held insurance coverage compared to 2013. Since people use substantially more services when they are insured than when they are uninsured, covering more people naturally leads to higher overall expenditures. The growth in expenditures associated with more coverage is entirely consistent with expectations. In 2011, CMS projected that the ACA would lead to an increase in the insured share of the US population from 84.4 percen...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Costs and Spending Following the ACA CMS national health spending Source Type: blogs