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For the first year since at least 1960 – when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) began tracking national health expenditures – total health spending in 2020 was less than in the previous year. 

The rapid decline and subsequent rebound in the use of health care services and associated health spending in the U.S. as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic has been well documented. Spending on PHC from September 2020 through February 2021 has averaged nearly 0.5% below the same period the year before, suggesting that the pace of the recovery in spending has stalled, at least temporarily.

In this month’s Health Sector Economic Indicators briefs, we incorporate new CMS health expenditure data for 2020 and show the impact of federal spending on near-record growth, while healthcare prices rise slightly and 2021's labor trends persist. 

National health spending is declining as a share of GDP, health care price growth remains well below economywide inflation, and health employment continues to show moderate growth.

According to data analyzed from the BLS American Time Use Survey, accessing professional health care services required on average 34 minutes of travel and 11 minutes of waiting, a burden that hasn’t changed over the past 11 years.

Health care jobs have begun to return, starting with the outpatient settings that were most impacted by the Covid-19 shutdown.

With yesterday’s release of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) data for the second quarter of 2020, dire economic anxieties were confirmed as we saw the worst reading in the series’ history (which goes back to 1947): a drop of 32.9% at a seasonally adjusted annual rate.

79% of health care jobs held by men have returned compared to only 62% for women, resulting in  530,000 fewer women employed in health care through October.