Total Spending on Medical Devices in the U.S.

According to AdvaMed, a US based medical device industry trade group, total spending on medical devices reached $150 Billion Dollars in 2010, which represented  5% of overall health care dollars.  Although the costs of devices and diagnostics represents a relatively low percentage of overall healthcare expenditures a disproportional amount of scrutiny is focused on controlling the costs of devices and diagnostics.

Overall medical inflation in the U.S. - the rate at which prices for health-care goods and services increase, has been lower than the overall inflation rate of the U.S. economy.  The United States’ $2.8 trillion health-care bill grew at a slower rate than the economy did during 2012, as newly released federal data marked the fourth-consecutive year in which medical spending increased more slowly than during any time since the government started measuring it half a century ago.

What we pay for health care crept up by only 3.7 percent in 2012, a rate in line with annual growth since 2009. Before the Great Recession, the U.S. experienced average annual increases in health-care spending that topped 7 percent from 2000 to 2008.