Health Affairs June 17, 2024
Last week, the Office of the Actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released updated national health expenditure projections. The actuaries project that health spending will resume its long upward march as a share of the economy, ending a period of more than a decade over which health’s share of the economy changed little (aside from a now-reversed pandemic-era spike).
In this piece, I first summarize the actuaries’ projections and put them in the context of historical trends. I then briefly consider why the health share of the economy has been relatively stable in recent years. I conclude that salient one-time events like the Great Recession, the COVID-19 pandemic, and enactment of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) likely...
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