Trends in Alaska's Health-Care Spending

Abstract

All Americans spend a lot to get health care—but Alaskans spend the most per resident, face the highest insurance premiums, and have seen overall spending grow much faster. Here we highlight some trends in Alaska’s health-care spending since the 1990s, based on existing publicly available data that allow us to compare changes in Alaska and nationwide. A chart book with much more detail is available on ISER’s website. We hope this broad information on trends in health-care spending will help Alaskans better understand what happened, consider possible reasons why, and think about potential ways to change the upward spiral.