A Health Affairs Forefront article by Johnson and Dieleman (2022) printed final week utilizing the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS’s) State Health Expenditure Accounts (SHEA) information. A earlier research checked out these information via 2014, however the current publication updates this evaluation via 2019. The authors first use a age- and sex-standardized well being spending per individual and regulate for inflation and regional value parity utilizing information from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Then, they apply a regression based mostly method to regulate for state variations in per capita earnings, inhabitants density, behavioral well being threat, and time (which the authors outline because the tendency of well being spending to extend annually throughout all states).
Using this methodology, they discover that:
…nearly half of the variation in state well being care spending was defined by earnings and regional costs. These two elements alongside time, well being dangers (bodily exercise and smoking prevalence), inhabitants density, age, and intercourse defined greater than 75 % of the variation
In different phrases, 23% of the variation in well being care spending throughout states remained unexplained.
The authors additionally examined how Medicaid eligibility enlargement enacted underneath the Affordable Care Act affected spending. The authors discover that:
…growing [Medicaid] earnings eligibility thresholds for kids and adults was considerably related to increased complete well being spending, however that growing eligibility thresholds for pregnant girls was related to decrease complete spending…Medicaid enlargement in any state led to 2 % increased complete spending in subsequent years in comparison with non-expansion states.
Read the total article right here.