In perusing the excellent work of the Peterson-Kaiser Health System Tracker project, we recently came across an analysis (depicted on the left, below) of Medicare spending patterns broken down by age of beneficiary. Based on 2014 data, the analysis shows how much was spent per capita in traditional Medicare fee-for-service on beneficiaries of each age. (The analysis excludes Medicare Advantage data, and also doesn’t include beneficiaries aged 65, for whom a full year of spending data wasn’t available.)

What’s interesting is how spending patterns differ across age cohorts—inpatient spending peaks at age 92 and then declines, spending on physician services peaks at age 85, skilled nursing and hospice spending ramp up quickly for much older beneficiaries. To see how these patterns might play out if applied to the Baby Boom generation, we combined the Peterson-Kaiser analysis with our earlier look at generational aging. The result is the chart on the right, below, which shows how each bucket of spending will increase over the coming 25 years given aging of the population.
 
A couple of interesting observations from this (admittedly imperfect) analysis.

First, the sheer size of the baby boom generation will drive a huge increase in Medicare spending over the next 25 years. And a full third or more of the total Medicare spend on Baby Boomers isn’t even captured here—that will come via payments to Medicare Advantage plans.

Second, inpatient care drives a huge amount of the total spend. It’s clear that an urgent priority is finding ways to shift spending from the light grey bars (inpatient) to the other segments—we need to pull forward the shift from inpatient to other settings from where it was in 2014’s population. Recall that this is traditional Medicare—strategies like accountable care organizations (ACOs) and other care management/population health reforms will be critical here.

Finally, in addition to changing the trend with innovations in care delivery models, we should expect technology and pharmaceuticals to play a role in inflecting the shape of this graph. Whether that impact will produce a net savings or a net increase in spending remains to be seen.