Healthcare spending up 44% among employer health plans, study reveals
Becker’s Hospital Review
9/25/18
Americans with health insurance coverage through their employer — the largest insured population in the U.S. — saw healthcare spending increase 44 percent from 2007 through 2016, according to a recent study in Health Affairs.
Health Care Cost Institute researchers estimated the average annual 4.1 percent increase using a national sample of healthcare claims from their database. The HCCI database has private health insurance claims data from Aetna, Humana, UnitedHealthcare and Kaiser Permanente.
Researchers found spending on outpatient services grew quicker than any other type of service at 5.7 percent annually. The overall distribution of spending across categories, however, remained largely unchanged, according to the study.