In 2024, the US economy spent $5.3T on healthcare, an all-time high according to recently released data from CMS. Occupying 18 percent of the US economy, healthcare’s share of GDP in 2024 was only topped by 2020 and 2021, when COVID spiked our health spending and tanked the rest of our economy. According to CMS actuaries, “non-price factors were the driver” of growth, meaning that the volume and complexity of care increased more than the prices paid for that care. Relatedly, spending on care services, over 40 percent of which is hospital care, grew at more than double the rate of non-service spending. (The non-service category includes drugs and medical devices, commercial insurance overhead, and the government’s healthcare administration costs.) Moreover, across 2023-2024, personal healthcare spending grew at its fastest two-year rate since 1991-1992. There is no simple explanation for this sustained growth in the use of health services. Instead, it appears to result from some combination of temporal factors, like the uninsured rate hitting an all-time low and a post-COVID care rebound, coinciding with more systemic factors, including an aging population, the introduction of new and expensive pharmaceuticals, and the lack of effective price controls on healthcare services.