Trilliant Health just released its 2025 Trends Shaping the Health Economy Report, delivering a uniquely holistic perspective on the healthcare market through the lens of supply and demand.
Here’s the state of play. Health expenditures are growing faster than the rest of the economy, and they’re projected to represent 20.3% of GDP by 2033.
- The U.S. spends more and gets less than peer nations, which might have been tolerable when our federal debt was at $800B in 1980, but definitely isn’t now that it’s at $37T.
What levers can we pull? This year’s 115 page analysis looks into six macro trends driving the healthcare economy, and underlines each of them with concrete stories from real-world data.
- 1) Affordability concerns are reshaping demand. Medical prices are up 54.5% since 2009, and they’re pressuring patients and employers to weigh their options – especially when rates for an inpatient procedure can vary as much as 7x within the same facility depending on the payor (p. 19).
- 2) Stakeholders are slow to adapt to demographic trends. Mortality rates among adults aged 18-44 have been rising as the fertility rate falls, shrinking the share of Americans with employer-sponsored coverage (p. 22).
- 3) Specialty care intervention is incentivized over primary care prevention. In 2024, behavioral health visits rose 11.4%, while primary care visits declined 5.6%, marking the first time behavioral health utilization surpassed primary care (p. 43).
- 4) Fraud, waste, and abuse are pervasive. The share of high-complexity ED visits has risen sharply, increasing from 36.6% to 47.8% of visits between 2018 and 2024, underscoring the financial impact of upcoding (p. 57).
- 5) Alternative therapies are accelerating. GLP-1 utilization increased 745% from 2018 to 2023, while bariatric surgery volumes were flat to declining, illustrating how high-margin procedures face growing competition from medications (p. 86).
- 6) If the industry won’t deliver value, the government will. Federal programs have consistently failed to bend the cost curve (MSSP savings are less than 1% of Medicare spending), and there’s mounting political pressure for top-down structural reform (p. 89).
The Takeaway
The U.S. healthcare system is at a crossroads. As Trilliant put it so nicely, the choice for all health economy stakeholders is whether to implement “radical change from the inside” or “to be subjected to such change by external forces.”
