Despite Increasing Health Care Costs, Health Outcomes are Showing Limited Improvement
Since 1999, health spending per capita rose 59% after adjusting for inflation. At the same time, however, life expectancy has risen 1.9 years while the average age that people die has risen only 0.7 years. Despite increases in health care spending, life expectancy has gone down for three consecutive years (Fig. 85).
The percentage of individuals who are overweight or obese reached 66.9% in 2017 (Fig. 83), the highest it has been since the government began measuring this outcome with the CDC's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) survey in 1996. At that time, only 52.2% of the population was overweight or obese.