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A new report looks specifically at spending on healthcare for the privately insured in the U.S in 2014. Here are the findings.
Per capita healthcare spending for the population younger than age 65 and covered by employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) has been growing at fairly steady rates over the last five years, according to a report from the Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI), a non-profit, non-partisan research organization.
In 2014, spending grew 3.4% to $4,967 per capita, according to the report. Healthcare spending increased because of rising average price of services, while at the same time, the use of services declined. The only exception that HCCI found was with generic prescriptions: use of generic prescriptions rose in 2014.
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Frost
“The privately insured population in the U.S. is quite large, and represents a sizable portion of money spent on healthcare,” says Amanda Frost, PhD, MA, senior researcher at the HCCI. “It is important to understand what healthcare services this population is using, and how much money is being spent on them. Much of what we know about the U.S. healthcare system comes from Medicare data. But the ESI population is different than the Medicare population in many important ways. The HCCI data in general, and this report specifically, allows a greater understanding of the ESI population, and provides an opportunity for unique comparisons to other populations.”
Here are six takeaways from the report: