Poverty Really Does Matter When It Comes To Health Care Spending

With better analytics, we're learning more about how the U.S. population uses health care resources. Last week, we looked at the “compression” in spending – with a very small percentage of consumers using a very large proportion of health care resources (see From 5:95 To 1:99).

What the emerging data also reveals is that much of the disparity in the use of health care resources is due to a disparity among the low- and high-income populations. Low-income consumers are generally high utilizers of acute care services – with studies showing that low-income consumers have higher . . .