Spending on medical products and services continued to tick up in 2021, reaching $12,914 per person that year, even as the share of the economy devoted to healthcare expenditures shrunk slightly, according to the analysis from the CMS Office of the Actuary published in Health Affairs on Wednesday.
Healthcare spending skyrocketed in 2020 while the U.S. GDP decreased due to the pandemic.
But those trends reversed last year as the economy recovered and the government spent less on COVID-19 programs, leading healthcare spending to decline to 18.3% of the GDP in 2021, down from 19.7% in 2020.
