How the Economic Slowdown Has Drastically Affected How Much America Spends on Health Care

[marmar]

Al Jazeera English / By Laura Tyson

How the Economic Slowdown Has Drastically Affected How Much America Spends on Health Care
The weak economy has caused people to postpone consumption of health care services and has encouraged states and employers to restrain their spending on health.

May 12, 2013 |


Over the last five years, the growth of health care spending in the US has slowed dramatically - to the lowest rate in the past 50 years. The slowdown is not a surprise. It is a predictable result of the recession and slow recovery that have left millions of Americans without health insurance and dampened household spending.

But the size of the slowdown is surprising, as is the fact that it started several years before the 2008 recession - and not only in the private insurance system, but also in Medicare and Medicaid, the two major government health programmes. (Medicare provides health coverage for retirees, and Medicaid provides coverage for low-income Americans and their children and those with disabilities.)

What explains this slowdown in health care spending? How much of it is attributable to the weak economy, and how much is the result of changes in provider and consumer behaviour?

Slowdown

Two recent studies offer different answers, but both predict that at least some of the slowdown will persist even after the economy recovers. That would be good news for the US economy, which currently devotes nearly 18 percent of GDP to health care, by far the largest share among developed countries. It would also be good news for America's fiscal position, because Medicare and Medicaid are the two largest contributors to the long-term federal budget deficit. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/how-economic-slowdown-has-drastically-affected-how-much-america-spends-health-care

[drm604]

1. If it is due to postponement of health care,

it's going to end up costing MORE in the long run because some untreated minor conditions will become expensive major conditions that won't be ignored.

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3. our ceo, who's usually quite reasonable and quite likely a democrat, was trumpeting high-deductible

health care plans as "getting the incentives right", that is, the way to keep health care costs down is to put the costs on the patient so they make the right economic decisions.

the trouble with that thoughtless talking point is that most decisions made below the level of even high deductibles are preventive in nature. any single surgical procedure blows out most high deductibles.

consider breast cancer. do you have an economic incentive to chose between a mastectomy or chemo/radiation/etc.? without insurance at all, perhaps you do, but with a high-deductible plan there's little incentive one way or the other because you're exceeding you deductible either way.

on the other hand, you DO have an economic incentive to avoid having that lump checked out in the first place because THAT will not max out your deductible.

HOW STUPID IS THAT??


the fact is that high-deductible plans in fact get the incentives all wrong and may even be worse economically than low-deductible plans.

frankly it's short-term greed for the insurance companies to work this way. they should want to pay, for FREE, for things like checking out lumps and other things such as blood-pressure-controlling medications and cholesterol-reducing medications. there shouldn't even be a co-pay because they should NOT want to give you even a small incentive to expose them to the financial risk of a major heart problem.

[unblock]

2. frankly i think it's due to them bleeding us dry.

i mean, this industry is more than 1/6th of the entire economy. how much more of the entire economy could it possibly become?