10 States Where Employers Spend the Most, and Least, on Health Care

(Related: 10 Top States for Obesity, for the CDC's Highest Earners) Analysts have created a web tool that can help you show clients and prospects what you know in your gut: health care costs vary widely from market to market, and have no clear relationship with care quality. The analysts, who are affiliated with the Commonwealth Fund, used data from the 2016 Truven Marketscan Database to show users how state-level health care spending varies for people with Medicare, and for people with employer-sponsored health coverage. The tool shows, for example, that the quality of care in Hawaii is great, but that Hawaii's average per-enrollee spending on health care is near the bottom. The tool also hints at provider efforts to shift costs for patients who come in with low-paying Medicare plans to patients with employer-sponsored coverage: the higher a state's average cost per Medicare enrollee is, the lower its average cost per employer plan member tends to be, and vice versa. Want to know more about health care spending in your state? Look at the data cards in the slideshow above for a taste. The tool itself is available here. — Read Only 5% of Our Off-Season Buyers Can Afford Major Medical: Web Broker, on ThinkAdvisor. — Connect with ThinkAdvisor Life/Health on LinkedIn and Twitter.