Eli's Hospice Insider

Medicare Advantage spending has shot up.

It may feel like hospice spending has skyrocketed in recent years, but when you look at Medicare spending overall, it’s stayed about the same.

In 2010, hospice spending made up 3 percent of Medicare’s $517 billion in spending, the Medicare Payment Advisory Committee shows in its 2021 Medicare spending data book. The figure was the same — 3 percent — in 2019, according to MedPAC.

During the same period, home health spending fell from 4 percent to 2 percent, in contrast.

Another big change: “Spending on managed care plans has grown from 22 percent of Medicare spending in 2010 to 34 percent in 2019,” MedPAC highlights in the data book. “This growth is largely because the number of beneficiaries enrolled in Medicare Advantage nearly doubled over this period” while “the number of beneficiaries in fee-for-service (FFS) Medicare has stayed relatively flat,” it says.

See the data book at http://medpac.gov/docs/default-source/data-book/july2021_medpac_databook_sec.pdf.