Geographic Variations in Spending and Utilization Across Payer Types

For the first time, a team lead by Yale, Stanford, and Dartmouth researchers has created new measures that capture small area variations in health care spending and utilization across all three insurance payers–Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers–as well as a composite measure that captures overall spending by region. The findings, published in JAMA Network Open in July 2022, are summarized in this brief report. The Medicare and Medicaid data can also be downloaded; we are not able to post publicly the HCCI data on private insurance spending and utilization, nor the composite measure.