Are we as a society really getting the most value for our healthcare dollars? That was the question that Sanjula Jain wanted to answer. As senior vice president of market strategy and chief research officer at Trilliant Health, Jain wanted to look at the macroeconomic trends to assess whether consumers and payers are getting value from the dollars spent for healthcare in America.
What Jain and her colleagues found and documented in their recent report is that increasing utilization of healthcare services and the increasing amounts of money spent haven’t increased health, quality of life or life expectancy.
“There’s a lot of indications that outcomes are getting worse,” Jain said in an interview. “We’re spending more money. Mortality is up. We’re not seeing a lot of compliance to value-based programs. Providers are having to spend millions of dollars just to do quality reporting, and what do we have to show for it?”
National health expenditures increased from $2.8 trillion in 2012 to $4.5 trillion in 2022. But there has been relatively little change in demand or utilization for healthcare services. In fact, according to the many macroeconomic measures that Trilliant Health assessed, the money spent on U.S. healthcare doesn’t appear to be leading to healthier Americans. Consider:
- The health status of Americans is deteriorating. Data suggest that the number of Americans with chronic conditions will increase from 137.3 million in 2020 to 221.1 million in 2050.
- Although the overall cancer incidence rate is decreasing, the incidence of melanomas, uterine and pancreatic cancers is growing since 1999. The breast cancer incidence rate has remained stable since 1999.
- Cancers among people younger than 45 years of age are growing, especially breast, colon, kidney and uterine cancers, which are up since 2018.
- Although life expectancy has increased over the last century, healthy life expectancy remained relatively flat from 2000 to 2019, with a decline in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Life expectancy in the United States is almost four years lower than in countries such as Australia, Canada, France, Japan, Sweden and Switzerland.
- U.S. infant and maternal mortality rates also above those of other countries. Mortality from chronic liver disease for those between the ages of 18 to 44 years is growing.
