Author
Joshua Cook
Assistant Director of External Relations
Contact
ACHI Communications
501-526-2244
jlyon@achi.net
From the Ozark Mountains to the Delta, Arkansas varies in terrain, economic vitality, and healthcare needs. While differences in terrain are apparent, a region’s healthcare landscape — the needs of residents, provider availability and service use, and who pays for that care — can be less apparent. To support greater transparency in healthcare spending in Arkansas, ACHI developed the Arkansas Healthcare Expenditures Dashboard.
Released in November 2024, the dashboard is an interactive tool that leverages the Arkansas Healthcare Transparency Initiative’s All-Payer Claims Database to provide a window into expenditures for medical, pharmacy, and dental services in the state. The payment amounts indicated in the dashboard reflect total claim amounts paid to healthcare providers — a combination of payments by insurers and insured individuals’ out-of-pocket payments — for the years 2021-2023.
The dashboard is intended to support assessments of health system performance, healthcare access challenges, and the influence of various factors on healthcare spending in the state. To help users better understand the dashboard’s potential applications, here we highlight medical expenditures across four counties in the southeastern corner of the state. The expenditures examined are for 2021, the most recent year for which Medicare data are available.
Average Annualized Medical Expenditures in Southeast Arkansas
The Arkansas Healthcare Expenditures Dashboard allows users to examine total and average annualized (i.e., estimated for a full year whenever data for a full year were not available) per-person expenditures at the state and county levels. This provides a way to examine medical spending that, unlike analyses using statewide data, can account for differences in population size and spending between different regions of the state.
Ashley, Chicot, Desha, and Drew counties in Arkansas’s southeast corner, which we’ll look at here, are four of the state’s more rural communities in the Mississippi Delta region. For 2021, medical care in the four counties accounted for a combined $467 million in total medical expenditures, compared to the statewide total of almost $20 billion.
Average per-person annualized healthcare expenditures for medical care in the four counties were notably higher than the 2021 statewide average of $9,277. Chicot County had the highest average annualized medical expenditure of the four counties at $11,130, which was 20% higher than the statewide average. It was followed by Ashley County at $10,723 and Drew County at $10,498. Desha County had the lowest average annualized medical expenditure of the four counties at $9,680, still above the statewide average.
Medicare and Medicare Advantage Enrollment and Expenditures
Nationwide, more Medicare-eligible residents are choosing alternative Medicare Advantage plans over traditional Medicare. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, more than half (54%) of the eligible Medicare population nationally was enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan in 2024. In the four Southeast Arkansas counties spotlighted here, Medicare Advantage covered 28% of Medicare-eligible Arkansans in 2021.
As shown here, average annualized per-person expenditures by Medicare and Medicare Advantage varied considerably, with expenditures for Medicare enrollees being higher compared to those for Medicare Advantage enrollees in all four counties:
- In Ashley County, the average annualized medical expenditure for Medicare Advantage enrollees was $12,378, which was $7,283 less than the expenditure for Medicare enrollees in the county.
- In Chicot County, the average annualized medical expenditure for Medicare Advantage enrollees was $11,706, which was $8,805 less than the expenditure for Medicare enrollees in the county.
- In Desha County, the average annualized medical expenditure for Medicare Advantage enrollees was $13,611, which was $4,269 less than the expenditure for Medicare enrollees in the county.
- In Drew County, the average annualized medical expenditure for Medicare Advantage enrollees was $14,149, which was $3,762 less than the expenditure for Medicare enrollees in the county.
Of all the payer types included in the dashboard — commercial, traditional Medicaid, Medicaid qualified health plans, Medicare, and Medicare Advantage — traditional Medicare had the highest total expenditures for all four counties, representing 41% of payments for medical care in 2021.
Medicaid Expansion Enrollment and Expenditures
Medicaid qualified health plans (QHPs) cover most of the state’s Medicaid expansion population, including 16% of covered individuals in the four Southeast Arkansas counties spotlighted here. In those counties, Medicaid QHP plans accounted for $49 million in total medical expenditures in 2021 on behalf of 7,863 low-income adults. Expenditures by county were as follows:
- In Ashley County, Medicaid QHPs covered 2,761 low-income adults and accounted for $17 million in total medical expenditures, with an average annualized per-person payment of $7,272.
- In Chicot County, Medicaid QHPs covered 1,477 low-income adults and accounted for $8.2 million in total medical expenditures, with an average annualized per-person payment of $6,641
- In Desha County, Medicaid QHPs covered 1,538 low-income adults and accounted for $8.7 million in total medical expenditures, with an average annualized per-person payment of $6,892.
- In Drew County, Medicaid QHPs covered 2,087 low-income adults and accounted for $15 million in total medical expenditures, with an average annualized per-person payment of $8,526.
The publication of the Arkansas Healthcare Expenditures Dashboard marks the first time that data on the state’s healthcare expenditures have been made available in this manner. The dashboard can be used to ask a wide array of questions about healthcare spending in Arkansas, including much more specific and varied questions than those asked in this post.
