All-Payer Measures of Health Spending and the Link among Spending, Health Care Utilization, and Health Outcomes

This project developed a new measure of health spending and used it to assess health care utilization patterns across Medicare, Medicaid, and the privately insured. The new measure provides the first national picture of overall per capita medical spending at the regional level, and is a powerful new tool for policy evaluation. Our work to date has involved linking data from Blue Health Intelligence (an aggregator of commercial data for Blue Cross plans) and Optum-Labs (a data enclave that includes UnitedHealth claims) together with Medicare claims data for fee-for-service beneficiaries. The consolidated database includes tens of millions of health insurance enrollees in multiple plans, and we are already using these data to characterize the spending patterns and health care utilization of people in different communities.