This is Matthew Holt, back with more on why health care costs so dang much.
Health Affairs (the essential peer reviewed health policy journal) has an article from the very well respected Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC) which announces that the decrease in the increase of health spending has stalled (here's the slightly more digestible press release). No kidding, the press release starts off with this line. See if you can get the gobbledygook here:
"The reprieve from faster-growing health care costs stalled in 2004 as costs per privately insured American grew 8.2 percent"
The good news is that nominal GDP growth (real growth plus inflation) was 5.2% in 2004, so health care costs (the 8.2%) were less than double that. So in the bizzaro world of American health care, it's still something of a success when health care is expanding only are only a little under double the rate of the rest of the economy or less than three times the inflation rate. That's why health care takes up 15% of the economy now when it was around 5% in 1970.
But the two key questions are a) do we have to spend so much more? and b) what are we getting for the money?
