Since a considerable amount of medical spending occurs in the last six months of each person's life, and Medicare pays for a significant proportion of this, the age factor could contribute to lower spending from federal sources. This database includes direct spending on patient care, over the counter drugs, prescription drugs and related administrative costs. It does not include spending for education and regulation of health care providers, health inspections or activities such as spraying for mosquitoes. The spending information in the database is sorted by purchaser, then by the service purchased. For state spending, funds are also sorted by state agency.
Some agencies have multiple health care spending programs.
Some programs, such as Medicare, Medicaid and funds from the federal Health Resources Services Administration, may flow through multiple private and public entities. The first column in Table 1 includes these totals, the next column breaks down some of the summary categories and the third identifies duplicate spending to produce the final column, an unduplicated count of Texas health care spending.