mockabout

What is this?

It's a sankey plot representing the tangled mess of several departments and services and programs all basically trying to solve the same problem: paying for health care. Last month I stumbled on this blog which described it as an eldritch horror.

How has health coverage changed over time?

After creating that json file, I found an excel sheet on the Historical page with even more data, back to 1960. Here is how some of the larger programs change over time. Same as above, but normalized to 100%.

Where does the money go?

Here are the top 5 health coverage expenses. The total for the year 1960, is about $18.6B. If you plug that into an inflation calculator it'll return $204.3B, which as you can see is way less than the $3.5T total for 2023, meaning coverage expenses have increased by over 17 times the rate of inflation. I'm not an expert, but I would call that bad.

What contributes to net cost?

Here's how coverage programs contribute to the net cost of coverage. The net cost is a bunch of things, but basically the cost to administer a program plus profit.

What's the most efficient program?

This compares what percent of each coverage program goes toward net cost. Depending on which side of the transaction you're on, these bars represent either efficiency or inefficiency. By comparing the percent that goes toward net cost, it's possible to estimate how much money would be saved if private health insurance was as efficient as Medicare (assuming we want to minimize net cost).