Improving Health Literacy Could Prevent Nearly 1 Million Hospital Visits and Save Over $25 Billion a Year

UnitedHealth Group—a managed healthcare and insurance company—developed this 2020 brief. The brief focuses on people who are enrolled in Medicare.

The brief:

• Includes a color-coded map that shows the health literacy level of each U.S. county.
• Gives figures that show improved health outcomes and lower costs in counties with high health literacy.
• Predicts what would happen to health outcomes and costs if all counties had high health literacy.
• Tells how the private and public sectors can improve health literacy and support people with limited health literacy.

The brief uses data from the American Community Survey, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the U.S. Census Bureau, and other sources.

#HealthLiteracyStatistics