While US Healthcare Spending Slows, States’ Share Grows

Although U.S. healthcare spending is in a multiyear slowdown, growing just 4 percent in 2011, state and local government healthcare spending is growing much faster, up 10 percent in the same year, according to a report by the Pew Center for the States.

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The report looked at CMS data and found states and localities spend about 30 percent of revenues on Medicaid. Overall Medicaid costs grew less than 3 percent, but federal aid to the program from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and its extensions were allowed to expire in 2011, causing the state and local share for Medicaid to climb 22 percent over 2010 expenses.

Projections from CMS expect a 55 percent rise in state and local Medicaid spending, adjusted for inflation, between 2011 and 2021. The less ominous data observation is that the growth so far has been propelled by an influx of 18 million newly eligible Medicaid beneficiaries during the recession, not by growth in per-person spending, which was actually slower in Medicaid than in private insurance premiums from 2000 to 2009.

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