National health expenditures increased 9.3 percent between 2001 and 2002, reaching nearly $1.6 trillion. As a percentage of gross domestic product, national health spending rose to 14.9 percent in 2002 from 14.1 percent in 2001 and 13.3 percent in 2000. In 2002, private-sector health spending...

This Issue Brief presents the findings of a study of what employers think and do about providing health benefits for their own workers and what they think about covering the population without health benefits. Most Americans under age 65 received health coverage through employers. Yet, about 16...

Renewed health care cost growth may create an incentive for health plans and employers to keep employees as healthy as possible by emphasizing wellness, health promotion, and disease management programs. Disease management is defined as a systematic approach to coordinated health care that seeks...

This study provides an examination of the utilization of and expenditures on prescription drugs; the growth of these expenditures; and the sources of that growth. Considerable discussion is devoted to factors that influence the rate of growth in prescription drug expenditures. In addition,...

The sixth annual Health Confidence Survey (HCS) finds that almost one-half of Americans continue to be extremely or very satisfied with the quality of medical care they receive. However, they are increasingly dissatisfied with the costs of health insurance and the costs of care not covered by...

This article presents current activity in the privacy of personal health information (PHI) and the quality of health care, discusses the connections between them, and examines the effects of this activity on certain groups. In recent years, as more insurers, providers, and purchasers have...

The 2002 Health Confidence Survey finds that Americans' confidence in and satisfaction with the health care system in the United States remain remarkably stable. Almost half of survey respondents continue to be extremely or very satisfied with the health care they are receiving in general, and...

Employers, facing renewed health care cost growth, may emphasize health promotion and wellness programs for their employees in order to control health care spending. This article assesses health promotion objectives, plan prevalence and effectiveness, and recently released regulations that will...

The 2001 EBRI/MGA Value of Benefits Survey finds that American workers' preferences for various employee benefits, and for employee benefits in general, changed little between 1999 and 2001, despite the economic downturn and the terrorist attacks in September, 2001. In 2001, 77 percent of...

This paper presents findings from the 2001 Health Confidence Survey (HCS), a survey sponsored by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI), the Consumer Health Education Council (CHEC), and Mathew Greenwald & Associates, Inc., and conducted annually since 1998. According to the survey,...