Ouch! The Health Care Costs of Back Pain

About 80 percent of Americans have back pain at some point in their lives. And for most of us, it is a recurring problem. This is why back pain accounts for a huge chunk of health care spending in the United States.

Exactly how much do we spend on back pain in a year? That’s not an easy question to answer. These authors used a huge national survey done in 1998 to find out. They sifted through the data and sorted out all back pain patients. They uncovered a lot of eye-opening information:

  • Health care expenses for back pain totaled 90.7 billion dollars.
  • The average person with back pain had yearly health care expenses that were 60 percent higher than the average person without back pain.
  • A small percentage of the back pain patients accounted for most of the expenses. The most expensive 10 percent of patients used up more than 50 percent of all the dollars spent on back pain. This is not surprising given that some types of back problems can be very hard to diagnose and treat.
  • Disc disorders were the category of problem that involved the most expenses.
  • Back sprains and strains had the lowest expenses.
  • The average back pain expenses tended to be higher for the elderly, women, white patients, and people with some kind of insurance.

    The authors tried to include all health care expenses for back pain, including therapists, drugs, and home health services. Inpatient hospital care ate up the biggest percentage of the money (31 percent). Office visits (26 percent) and prescription drugs (almost 16 percent) were the next highest categories of expenses. The authors note that the true costs of back pain are probably higher, because the analysis didn’t include nursing homes.

    The authors found differences in the expenses for people with public insurance (Medicaid and Medicare) compared to people with private insurance. They recommend more study to understand why this was true.

    Studies like this one are important. They may not tell doctors anything new about back pain. But the results help government agencies, insurance companies and HMOs, and hospitals set policies about back care treatments.