Just so that people reading this thread know that there is the medical expense version of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and it lives inside Medicare (CMS), and it publishes data. Most things people are trying to derive axiomatically on this thread, you can just look up.

It's really easy now with Claude and GPT5; just ask them a question and tell them to answer it for you, with cites, from the NHE. (The data I argue from precedes widespread LLM research; I built a site for this a couple years ago and didn't bother to update my data, because I assume it didn't get much better.)