New Trove of Data Sheds Light on High Health Care Spending in the U.S.
By Maya Brod, June 1, 2012
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The United States spends far more than any other nation on health care, but that does not translate to better health. As policymakers devise ways to spend our health care dollars more effectively, a new report by the Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI, a Burness Communications client) brings us one step closer to understanding what is driving health care spending growth and how to control for it.
With data from more than 3 billion claims provided by Aetna, Humana, and UnitedHealth, HCCI has compiled one of the largest troves of data ever assembled on health care spending by people with private insurance who are under age 65. As The Washington Post reported, previously, researchers analyzing health care costs extrapolated data from smaller databases, or relied on Medicare data, which cover only U.S. residents age 65 and older. HCCI’s access to multiple years of claims data from multiple health plans allows it to track changes in the use of health care services, including hospital and outpatient care, medical procedures, doctor visits, and prescription drugs by the privately insured. These analyses will help guide us to new answers to the thorny question of why we spend so much on health care in the U.S.
Monday’s report gives us a hint: most of the increase in health spending from 2009-2010 was driven by price increases. Higher prices for health care delivered by hospitals and other providers drove up health care spending at double the rate of inflation during the economic recession, even as patients used fewer health care services.
A more perplexing finding, which HCCI’s researchers plan to analyze further, shows that the growth in spending increased almost twice as fast for children under 18 as it did for people between 19 and 54.
Read stories in Politico, Bloomberg, and Kaiser Health News, for their take on the findings from Health Care Cost Institute’s inaugural report.