In 2015 the Bureau of Economic Analysis released an experimental set of measures referred to as the Health Care Satellite Account, which tracks national health care spending by medical condition. These statistics improve the understanding of the health care sector by blending medical claims data and survey data to present measures of national spending and cost of treatment by condition. This article introduces key aspects of the new account and uses it to study the health spending slowdown that occurred in the period 2000-10. Our analysis of the account reveals that the slowdown was driven by a reduction of growth in cost per case but that spending trends varied greatly across conditions and differentially affected the slowdown. More than half of the overall slowdown was accounted for by a slowdown in spending on circulatory conditions. However, there were more dramatic slowdowns in spending on categories such as endocrine system and musculoskeletal conditions than in spending on other categories, such as cancers.

We introduce a new source of detailed data on spending by medical condition to analyze US health care spending growth in the period 2000-14. We found that thirty conditions, which represented only 11.5 percent of all conditions studied, accounted for 42 percent of the real growth rate in per capita spending during this period, even though they accounted for only 13 percent of overall spending in 2000. Primary drivers of spending growth included the use of new technologies, a shift toward the provision of preventive-type services, and an aging and more obese population. The health benefits of many new technologies appeared to outweigh the associated expenditures on treatment, which indicates that these are cost-effective and provide a net value to society. However, while these technologies may be of value, new treatments are often more expensive than older ones.

The selected allocation method impacts aggregate inflation rates, but considering the variety of methods applied, the differences appear small. Future research is necessary to better understand these differences in other population samples and to connect disease expenditures to measures of quality.