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U.S. spending on health insurance grew at an accelerated rate in 2011, breaking a two-year trend of smaller cost increases. The culprit, a new study suggests, is not Americans seeking more treatment but rather rapid growth in the price of medical care.
Spending for private health insurance surged by 4.6 percent in 2011, according to a report from the Health Care Cost Institute. That growth rate is faster than the rest of the economy and higher than the previous year, which had 3.8 percent growth.
Average spending on a private insurance patient rose to $4,547 in 2011, compared with $4,349 in 2010. That statistic suggests that a recent downturn in health care spending may have been a temporary product of the recession rather than a more permanent change, as some health care economists have hoped.
"We don't know yet whether this is a one-off year aberration or a resumption of patterns of higher growth," said Health Care Cost Institute Director David Newman. "We just don't know. When you have one data point, you're cautious."
The Health Care Cost Institute used data from 40 million Americans with private insurance provided by health plans such as Aetna and Kaiser Permanente. The research does not include data on public insurance programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid, which the federal government will make available in early 2013.
Employers typically have tried to control costs by reducing the volume of care delivered, whether that means higher co-pays for
doctor visits or using prevention to catch costly diseases earlier.
Those efforts, this report suggests, have succeeded: Inpatient admissions to hospitals actually declined by 0.5 percent between 2010 and 2011.
He's going to nationalize it when that happens. Obama is a fucking loon.
