Navigate:

Economic woes one way to curb health spending

In these tough times, health spending is growing at a notably slower pace. |
AP Photo
Close

If the system is not as consumer-directed as many conservatives would like, opponents of such policies argue Americans already pay a hefty chunk of their health costs because of cuts employers have made to their benefits packages.

The 2011 Kaiser Employer Health Benefit Survey found that one in three of all workers with employer-sponsored insurance — and half of those at small businesses — have deductibles of more than $1,000 for individual coverage.

Text Size

-

+

reset

Kaiser also found that the number of employers offering high deductible health plans increased by 50 percent from 2010 to 2011.

A survey by PwC Health Institute found that almost half of Americans report deferring care because of costs. But health policy analysts say it’s not yet clear if the savings seen during the economic crunch are permanent — whether people are changing health care spending behavior or just delaying paying bills.

Spending could spike when the economy puts more money in people’s pockets, or if people just can’t put off the care any longer. If patients have conditions that went unmanaged and worsened because of money, it’s even possible that the country will wind up spending more on health care than if these patients had gone to the doctor in leaner times.

“People aren’t great at discriminating” between necessary and unnecessary services, said Genevieve Kenney of the Urban Institute.

Even though “we all agree that we want to get costs down,” she added, doing it this way is “not unambiguously good.”

Readers' Comments (5)

Despite this article, health insurance premiums continue to increase. One might hope that less demand for services could constrain costs, but in health care the opposite seems to be the case. Unclear how much is due to cost-shifting to higher-paying insurance plans by hospitals and providers constrained by lower Medicaid and Medicare payments.

That article states that premiums for employer-provided health insurance jumped 8-9 percent in 2011, passing $15,000 for family coverage. That’s a big jump from the 3 percent increase in 2010. But it’s in line with historical increases that have averaged just over 10 percent per year since 2001, according to the annual Kaiser Family Foundation's Employer Health Benefits survey.

Recession slowing health costs:...................What recession? According to the left and Obama, we're well on the road to recovery. Mr. Feder, you haven't read your talking points now, have you? Oh wait. Maybe you have. Obama's recovery is stalling, and it's all the fault of the people NOT in power. That's the ticket.

There's no "maybe" to cutting back on necessary and unnecessary care--the health policy literature pretty much proves that conclusively.

The issue is that focusing on patients is addressing the problem from the wrong end. Americans already carry some of the highest out of pocket burdens for health care on earth and we already have lower service utilization than almost every country in the OECD.

As a lot of recent health policy literature points out, the problem with the US health care system in unit pricing. No matter what product or service one looks at, costs in the US are 30%-50% higher here than elsewhere in the developed world (e.g. Western Europe or Japan). If we simply paid the same prices these nations do, we could find roughly $1 trillion in savings almost overnight.