Health Care Spending To Hit $4 Trillion by 2017

Health Care Spending To Hit $4 Trillion by 2017 in General Healthcare

A new report from The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services predicted Monday that the U.S. will spend over $4 trillion a year on health care by 2017.

Sound like a lot of money? It is. Written out, it looks like this: 4,300,000,000,000 — that’s eleven zeros. Put another way: it will be about one out of every five dollars spent in the U.S.

The increase in health care spending is being driven by inflation in the cost of medical services, and by an aging population. Starting in 2011, the baby boom generation will start collecting Medicare benefits. Over the next decade, the federal and state governments will be paying roughly 49 percent of the nation’s health care expenses.

Andrea Sisko, an economist with the CMS and one of the report’s authors, was quoted in The Washington Post: “The acceleration in public spending growth is due to the leading edge of the baby boomer generation enrolling in Medicare.”

The CMS report was published in the online edition of the journal Health Affairs.

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