California HealthCare Foundation has released its annual Health Care Costs 101 Snapshot, a visual representation of costs and financing trends over the past decade, as well as predictions of future costs. Taken from several public and private data sources, the presentation is a valuable overview of health care financing issues in California and the nation.

Health Care Costs 101 includes details on:

• National health spending as a share of gross domestic product;
• Per capita health costs nationwide;
• Spending distribution by health care categories;
• Who pays for health care;

Medicare paid $18.4 Billion in overpayments in 2004. This is about 9% of Medicare spending for the year. No effort was made to distinguish fraudulent overpayments from accidental overpayments, but the 2004 measures support the estimate that about 10% of healthcare is inappropriate. Of course these measures do not estimate how much of the care that was paid for was inappropriate. Inappropriate care is probably three times the size of inappropriate billing.

Download the text of the proposed Payment Error Rate Measurement rule in PDF format.