Each year, HCCI creates the Healthy Marketplace Index (HMI) to measure how health care spending varies across the United States. The HMI shows local health care spending, prices, and use compared to the national median. By describing how health care spending varies geographically, HMI is a starting point in understanding what is causing high and rising health care costs in a particular metropolitan area. Across the country, a range of factors drive health care spending. High spending on health care, in turn, forces families, businesses, and governments to make difficult tradeoffs between needed care and other priorities such as housing, education, and food. This case study begins to broaden HMI’s exploration of health care spending in specific areas by describing some of the factors contributing to spending, use, and prices in one area--Springfield, Illinois--including social determinants of health, prevalence of disease, health care providers, and health care markets. The HMI shows that health care spending in Springfield was 24% higher than the national median with higher prices and use, but a slightly lower cost mix of services provided. Spending in Springfield grew at a higher rate than the national median--about 21%--from 2016-2020, with most of the increase in recent years. Springfield’s HMI includes the greater Springfield metro area; in this case study, we discuss Springfield as well as broader Sangamon County, where Springfield is located.
Copyright:
Reproduced with permission of the copyright holder. Further use of the material is subject to CC BY-NC-ND license. (More information)