CORRECTION (Jan. 4, 2025): The original story stated that annual health care spending growth jumped more than 9% between 2020 and 2023. That number reflected the compound annual growth.

Nothing tosses people into bankruptcy as regularly as health bills. A fourth of us skip care because of the cost.

We understand the failures of our health care system intuitively — and it’s reinforced anecdotally. But the hard data of how that plays out in Kansas City has been missing. 

Now KC Health Collaborative is beginning to fill in the hard, tough facts about how the medical system we live in is letting us down.

“People are always happy to convene and fuss over a problem,” said Dan Cranshaw, executive director of the health collaborative. “But we want to be able to say, ‘What’s our next step going to be? Who needs to be at the table? And how do we move forward?’”

This month, KC Health Collaborative released a scorecard it says will provide a starting point for solving health inequities in Kansas City. It hopes that offering concrete information about specific gaps and identifying who slips through them gives policy makers and business leaders tools to make changes.

The scorecard relies on data from commercial health insurance claims paid between 2020 and 2023, and covers a range of topics from health screenings, disease diagnoses and money spent per person on doctors and medicines.

Not surprisingly, your cost is going up. The scorecard concludes health care spending in Kansas City jumped more than 30% overall during the three years, to $7,658 per person in 2023 from $5,846 in 2020. 

Cranshaw said those numbers illustrate why everyone has an interest in improving the system. Even if lacking health care hits poor and Black communities harder than others, the cost eventually affects everyone.

“It’s not just the folks who are suffering poor outcomes because of the ZIP code they live in or their socioeconomic status,” Cranshaw said. “It is also folks who are paying for health insurance.”

Data for this initial report came through the Midwest Health Initiative, a St. Louis organization that maintains a database of insurance claims in Missouri, and shows health patterns among commercially insured patients 64 and younger.

That shows only a sliver of the picture, Cranshaw said. Future reports from the organization will include Medicaid data, as well as information from federally qualified health clinics, which often treat uninsured patients. Planned additional reports also will separate data by race, ethnicity and language.

“We need to be able to get a sense of what is happening to these under-resourced communities, and what can we do better?” Cranshaw said. “We want to be sure that we are providing opportunities for folks to act, not opportunities to be overwhelmed.”

The numbers in the group’s December report card showed both gains and losses:

• Medical spending per person was $5,353 in 2023, compared with $4,309 in 2020, and pharmacy spending per person was $2,305 in 2023, compared with $1,536 in 2020.
• 8.9% of patients were readmitted to the hospital after 30 days for any reason in 2023, compared with 6.5% in 2020.
• 85.1% of patients had appropriate medication to manage asthma, compared with 77.2% three years earlier.
• 73.5% of patients received breast cancer screenings in 2023, compared with 71.7% in 2020.
• Patients had 2.5 primary care visits in 2023, compared with 2 in 2020.
• Out of 100 patients, 23.5 got an opioid prescription in 2023, compared with 31 out of 100 in 2020.
• And 211 out of 1,000 people went to the emergency department in 2023, compared with 181.7 out of 1,000 in 2020.

KC Health Collaborative is the project management organization for Health Forward’s KC Health Equity Learning and Action Network. Health Forward also provides funding for health reporting at The Beacon.