Some data on health care spending

Aaron Carroll has a post at the blog The Incidental Economist (see here) in which he comments on a recent report "The Concentration of Health Care Spending" (NICHM report, see here).  The report contains the following graph:

Carroll comments on the graph as follows:

"That’s the cumulative distribution of personal health care spending from 2009. There are so many ways to talk about this. One thing to note is that the top 5% of spenders (some of the sickest among us) account for about half of all health care spending. More significantly, the bottom half of spenders (ie the healthier half) account for less than 3% of all health care spending."

"When we talk about incentivizing people to forego care, we’re talking mostly about healthy people. When we talk about consumer directed health care, we’re talking mostly about healthy people. We don’t want sick people to avoid care. We want to stop healthy people from consuming it. The problem is that healthy people consume so little care to begin with. If we could incentivize the healthier half of people to forego all their personal health care spending, we’d spend $36 billion less out of a total $1.259 trillion in personal health care spending. That would be a drop in the bucket. And no one – no one at all – thinks we can get people to stop all their health care spending."

Merrill Goozner at the Fiscal Times (see here) has a post about the same data.  Goozner says, "The study serves as a cautionary note to advocates on the left or right who think eliminating waste or giving “consumers” a greater financial stake in health care decision-making will be magic bullets for holding down rising health care costs."  Indeed it does!  As I have said before, so much of the conversation about health care just isn't relevant to the everyday challenges people confront when accessing U.S. health care systems.  From the claim that health care should be treated as a "market" (really, please, where have you been receiving your health care?) to the notion that costs can be cut while access increases and new techniques/procedures are welcomed.  Mr. Carroll and his colleagues at The Incidental Economist constitute a small minority of experts that actually get it.  And they pay attention to the data instead of ideology and platitudes.