Stephen Heffler

National Health Spending In 2006: A Year Of Change For Prescription Drugs

In 2006, U.S. health care spending increased 6.7 percent to

Reconciling Medical Expenditure Estimates from the MEPS and NHEA, 2007

2.1 trillion, or

An Overview of the NHEA With Implications for Cost Analysis Researchers

7,026 per person. The health care portion of gross domestic product (GDP) was 16.0 percent, slightly higher than in 2005. Prescription drug spending growth accelerated in 2006 to 8.5 percent, partly as a result of Medicare Part Ds impact. Most of the other major health care services and public payers experienced slower growth in 2006 than in prior years. The implementation of Medicare Part D caused a major shift in the distribution of payers for prescription drugs, as Medicare played a larger role in drug purchases than it had before.

National Health Spending In 2004: Recent Slowdown Led By Prescription Drug Spending

OBJECTIVE Provide a comparison of health care expenditure estimates for 2007 from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) and the National Health Expenditure Accounts (NHEA). Reconciling these estimates serves two important purposes. First, it is an important quality assurance exercise for improving and ensuring the integrity of each sources estimates. Second, the reconciliation provides a consistent baseline of health expenditure data for policy simulations. Our results assist researchers to adjust MEPS to be consistent with the NHEA so that the projected costs as well as budgetary and tax implications of any policy change are consistent with national health spending estimates. DATA SOURCES The Medical Expenditure Panel Survey produced by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the National Health Center for Health Statistics and the National Health Expenditures produced by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Office of the Actuary. RESULTS In this study, we focus on the personal health care (PHC) sector, which includes the goods and services rendered to treat or prevent a specific disease or condition in an individual. The official 2007 NHEA estimate for PHC spending is

National Health Spending In 2005: The Slowdown Continues

1,915 billion and the MEPS estimate is

Health Spending Growth Up In 1999; Faster Growth Expected In The Future

1,126 billion. Adjusting the NHEA estimates for differences in underlying populations, covered services, and other measurement concepts reduces the NHEA estimate for 2007 to

Health spending projections through 2013.

1,366 billion. As a result, MEPS is

Health Spending Projections For 2001–2011: The Latest Outlook

240 billion, or 17.6 percent, less than the adjusted NHEA total.

The Next Ten Years Of Health Spending: What Does The Future Hold?

Background/Objective:The National Health Expenditure Accounts (NHEA) are the official government estimates of aggregate US health care spending. We summarize the data sources, methods, strengths, limitations, and applications of the NHEA. Methods:To compile this article, we provide background on the NHEA, a description of the data sources and methods used to produce them, some recent findings that the NHEA produced, as well a discussion of their strengths, limitations, and applications drawn from several different sources, both internal and external to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Results:The NHEA have a multitude of applications, including comparison with other economic data such as the Gross Domestic Product, reconciliation with other health spending data sources, and use in predictive and analytic models. The NHEA adhere to national income accounting standards and are comprehensive, mutually exclusive, multidimensional, and consistent over time. The NHEA do not contain microlevel detailed data and are subject to both sampling and nonsampling errors during the interim census years, although this is the case for all available data sources. Conclusions:Determining the correct method for measuring health care costs depends on one’s purpose, and analysis of health care cost data that requires aggregate-level statistics should consider use of the NHEA.