U.S. National Health Spending Estimates from CMS

DQS National health spending data provides estimates for U.S. national health expenditures. The dataset includes columns for CLASSIFICATION, ESTIMATE, STANDARD_ERROR, TIME_PERIOD, and TOPIC. It is published by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and was last updated in September 2025.

Use Cases

• Analyze trends in national health spending over TIME_PERIOD using ESTIMATE and STANDARD_ERROR columns.
• Compare expenditure estimates across different TOPIC and CLASSIFICATION categories, such as personal health care or insurance administration.
• Model confidence intervals for spending forecasts using ESTIMATE_LCI and ESTIMATE_UCI columns.
• Investigate subgroup variations in health spending by filtering on SUBGROUP and GROUP_ID fields.

Strengths

• Data is sourced from the authoritative Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services National Health Expenditure Accounts.
• Includes statistical measures like STANDARD_ERROR and confidence intervals (ESTIMATE_LCI, ESTIMATE_UCI) for reliability assessment.
• Dataset was updated in September 2025, indicating recent maintenance.

Limitations

• Sample data and total row count are unavailable, preventing assessment of dataset size and completeness.
• The specific time range (provenance.time_range) covered by the TIME_PERIOD column is not provided in the input.

Provenance

Source

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Office of the Actuary, National Health Statistics Group.

Collection Method

Data are from the National Health Expenditure Accounts, part of the NCHS Data Query System.

Freshness

Last updated on 2025-09-02.

Geography

United States