Does Vermont have the least expensive healthcare costs?
By - Vermont residents could be paving the way for the rest of the nation in terms of healthcare spending patterns, as a recent report found that those living in the Green Mountain State spent fewer dollars on healthcare between 2007 and 2011. However, Vermonters’ spending was also found to grow faster than the national average in that same timeframe, according to a study by from the Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI) prepared in cooperation with the Green Mountain Care Board (GMCB).
“This report shines a light on five years of health care trends for people with employer insurance in a reform-minded state,” Carolina Herrera, HCCI’s director of research, said in a statement. “Up until now, there has been a great deal of attention paid to national health spending. Vermont, and other states, want and need analyses like this to better understand what is changing within their state and for their citizens as they move forward with health reform.”
The report studied data from approximately 305,000 Vermonters younger than 65 per year who have employer-sponsored insurance between 2007 and 2011. Researchers then compared Vermont health care costs, utilization and prices to HCCI’s national data on 40 million Americans who have employer-sponsored health insurance.
The combined costs of medical and prescription spending were approximately $4,408 per employer-covered Vermonter compared to $4,520 nationally in 2011. Moreover, Vermonters spent about $138 less on their healthcare out of pocket in 2011 compared to the average American with ESI.
“HCCI’s work has established a baseline to help track changes in health spending in Vermont compared with the rest of the nation,” Dian Kahn, the GMCB’s Director Of Analysis And Data Management and VHCURES Program Director, added. “This is important to our work in Vermont because we need solid comparative data to track the impacts of changes and to gain a deeper understanding of how factors such as health status, age, prices, and availability of services influence trends in spending.”
The report also found that women paid for a larger share of their healthcare bills out-of-pocket than men in Vermont. Specifically, women with ESI paid $669 in 2011, while men paid $517 that same year.
In terms of hospital spending, the research showed that Vermont’s spending for inpatient care and outpatient visits accounted for 33 percent of healthcare spending, compared to 38 percent nationally.
Vermont was also recently lauded by National Coordinator for Health IT Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH, MSc, for its progress in building a health information exchange (HIE) infrastructure that includes broadband access in the state’s rural areas. DeSalvo said that Vermont was leading the way for the rest of the nation, especially because the state’s high EHR adoption rates among hospitals and physician providers, as well as its long-term effort to bring HIE capabilities to Vermont’s healthcare organizations.
