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Show Section 4: Utah's Health Care Costs, Access and Quality The new tables and graphs for this section are intended to replace the current health care expenditure data contained in pages 131-133 of Utah's Health, 1998. The new expenditure data are broken into the same three main groups as previously. The first group of tables displays per capita dollar expenditures, the second, per capita annaul rate of change, and the third, total dollar expenditures. Each group is further broken down into data for Utah, the Rocky Mountain Region, and the United States. In addition, the old tables break the expenditure data down into sections covering hospital, physician, nursing home, other, and total. The new data tables are broken down further into many additional sections providing more detailed spending information. Another improvement is the listing of consecutive years of data. The result is a much better presentation of where spending is occuring. Both the new and the old data were collected using similar sources. Due to a lack of complete data being available from any single source, data are collected from a number of sources. The Health Care Financing Administration provides a portion of the overall spending data for some years and some regions, but not all. The American Hospital Association provides a portion of the data on hospital spending. Facility Cost profiles and Medicaid profiles provide a portion of the data on nursing home spending. The United States Census Bureau and Social Security Administration provide the population figures. As a result of the collection methods and adjustments necessary, the data are rendered as accurate as possible. The Utah Department of Health fills in the information gaps using regression analysis and historical spending patterns. Although this is the case, the outcome is still a very accurate representation of health care expenditures. Any weaknesses in the data are minimized by careful calculations. Tables 101, 102 and 103 show per capita personal health expenditures in dollars. Looking at the three geographic regions, Utah residents spend less on health care than the Rocky Mountain Region and the United States. However, when you look at Utah's percent per capita of income spent on health care we are higher for many years. This is due to our lower per capita income. Although recently this is changing when compared to the entire United States, we still spend more than the Rocky Mountain Region. Figures 45 and 46 are provided to help show this relationship visually. Graph 1 shows how Utah compares with the Rocky Mountain Region and the United States in total per capita personal health care spending. Graph 2 shows Utah's percent per capita of income spent on health care. Tables 104, 105 and 106 are provided to show the percent annual change in per capita personal health care spending. Home Health stands out as an area of rapid growth in spending. Tables 107,108 and 109 show the dollars (in millions) spent on health care by region and service category. Looking at the tables and studying the increases and rates of change one is left to ponder what the future holds for spending in the next decade. Sheila Smith et al. has examined this question. She believes total annual health care expenditures nationally will reach over two trillion dollars by 2007. The increase will be greatest in the private sector where fewer managed care and cost control measures are present. Costs in the public sector are projected to grow slower in large part due to the presence of the management and control measures previously mentioned. Smith et al. also expects the cost of health care expressed as a percentage of GDP to increase to 16.6 percent by 2007. Others, including Paul Ginsburg, are more optimistic that overall costs will be lower. Ginsburg feels that the growing spread of managed care and market competition within the private sector will limit cost increases in the future. He points out the competing benefit plans offered to employers by plan administrators and the preference of employees who choose the lowest cost coverage. Source: Smith S, Heffler S, Freeland M. and the National Health Expenditures Projection Team. The next decade of health spending: a new outlook. Health Affairs, 1999, 18:4, p. 87. 119 |
