US Health Services Spending versus Health Outcomes

State comparison

Spending and measured burden

Farther right means higher health-care services consumption per resident. Higher means a larger age-adjusted share of adults reporting the selected condition or behavior.

Selected state Descriptive frontier Other jurisdictions

iEach dot is one matched jurisdiction. Dashed guides show medians among the included jurisdictions, not national targets. Hover or focus a dot for its estimate, interval, and survey sample.

Descriptive frontier

No included state is lower on both measures

This is a narrow comparison, not an efficiency score. A frontier state is not dominated by another included state with both lower spending and lower selected burden.

Direct comparison

Put up to three states side by side

The health bars include 95% confidence intervals. Differences whose intervals overlap still may or may not be statistically meaningful; this pilot does not run pairwise hypothesis tests.

State one

State two

State three

Health-care services consumption per resident

Age-adjusted health measure

Caveats

The chart describes how two state-level measures appear together. It can identify unusual combinations and useful comparisons. It cannot show that spending caused a health result, rate a health system, or separate medical care from income, age, environment, behavior, insurance design, migration, and other state differences.

The spending measure covers consumption of outpatient services and hospital and nursing-home services by or on behalf of residents. It is not a household bill, government budget, insurance premium, or complete measure of all health spending.

How are the health estimates calculated?

LifeMeter computed each state estimate from the 2025 CDC Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System public-use file. Survey responses were weighted with the CDC final weight, then directly age-adjusted to the 2000 U.S. standard adult population using six age bands. Approximate 95% confidence intervals use Taylor linearization with the published strata and primary sampling-unit fields.

The measures are self-reported. Height and weight used for obesity are also self-reported. Survey nonresponse, recall, question wording, and excluded populations can affect the estimates.

Why are three states absent?

California, Mississippi, and Nevada are omitted because they are absent from the 2025 CDC public-use file. CDC reports that California did not collect 2025 BRFSS data and that Mississippi and Nevada did not meet the minimum requirements for inclusion. The pilot does not mix in older observations without telling the reader.

Sources, public-domain status, and attribution

BEA and CDC are U.S. federal agencies. The underlying federal data are public domain. LifeMeter retains source names, measurement definitions, retrieval dates, and file hashes so the derived pilot can be reproduced and audited.

Technical definition of the frontier

For the selected health measure, a jurisdiction is on the displayed frontier when no other included jurisdiction has both equal-or-lower health-care services consumption per resident and equal-or-lower estimated burden, with at least one measure strictly lower. The frontier is recomputed every time the health measure changes. The connecting line is angular rather than smoothed because smoothing would imply values that were not observed.