While parts of the health system are stretched to the breaking point, the business of routine health care is shut down like the rest of the economy, and providers are facing unprecedented financial losses.

Today’s jobs report begins to reveal the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on employment. More than 700,000 jobs were lost since February.

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.

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.

The dramatic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated economic recession on health care utilization, spending, and employment have been well-explored by experts tracking the US health sector. In this blog we summarize some of our recent findings on health sector price growth, using data from our Health Sector Economic Indicators (HSEI) through March 2021, focusing on changes in price trends just before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2020 Americans reduced their use of healthcare services as they postponed elective care and avoided in-person visits, yet new CMS expenditure data show health spending increased by a near-record 9.7%. We explore what drove this.

Read Altarum’s recent blog reviewing some of the underlying trends in health sector price growth, including a look at the different trajectories of private insurance and Medicare prices for health care services in 2022.

The recent changes in nursing home staffing, census, and the number of nursing homes operating in the U.S. raises the question of how these changes have interacted to affect the extent of understaffing during and after the pandemic and the extent to which the proposed staffing standards from CMS are currently being met. Altarum's George Miller and Corey Rhyan address this question through a review of trends in nursing home resident census and staffing levels from before the start of the pandemic through the end of 2022.