PRICES & SPENDING • Jun 2017 • Volume 6 / Number 7
The cost of care: new insights into healthcare spending growth
BLS is celebrating the first anniversary of experimental disease-based price indexes, which adjust expenditures on disease for inflation. Statistical agencies have long collected price information on medical procedures, drugs, equipment, and services, but the cost of treating a patient is typically some combination of these goods and services. This article examines the reasons for reporting by disease rather than by service and explains the reasons behind the spending growth for each disease.
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Recent articles
Understanding the labor productivity and compensation gap
Increases in productivity have long been associated with increases in compensation for employees. For several decades beginning in the 1940s, productivity had risen in tandem with employees’ compensation. However, since the 1970s, productivity and compensation have steadily diverged. This trend, which will be referred to as the ‘productivity–compensation gap,’ has received much scrutiny from both academics and policymakers alike.
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Use with caution: interpreting Consumer Expenditure income group data
This Beyond the Numbers article examines assumptions users often make regarding how the CE measures household wealth, by providing examples of the nuances in the data and composition of five household groupings. The examples provide a clearer snapshot of economic well-being found in the income quintiles.
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How do United States consumer expenditures compare with the United Kingdom and Japan?
In 2014, U.S. consumers spent almost 19 percent of every dollar on transportation, which is 87 percent higher than what Japan spent. U.S. households also spent about 9 percent on out-of-pocket healthcare expenditures, which was 5 times higher than the U.K. Expenditure shares are the percentages of total expenditures allotted to each spending category. Japan’s share of food expenditures was the highest among the other two countries. The United States had increases in expenditures shares of transportation and healthcare.
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