Home Health & Hospice Week

General health care spending may have slowed in 2009, but home care spending did just the opposite.

Health care spending in the U.S. grew 4.0 percent in 2009, to $2.5 trillion or $8,086 per person, reports the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in its new National Health Expenditure Accounts (NHEA) report. That's the slowest rate of growth in the NHEA's 50-year history, due in great part to the economic recession, CMS says.

But home care spending for services by freestanding agencies grew by 10 percent in 2009 to $68.3 billion, CMS reports. That's up from a 7.5 percent increase the previous year.

To put home care spending in perspective, it accounted for only 3 percent of overall health care spending measured in the report, notes the National Association for Home Care & Hospice.

Durable medical equipment spending fell 0.8 percent in that time period. The report is at www.cms.gov/NationalHealthExpendData/02_NationalHealthAccountsHistorical.asp.