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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: steve harris who wrote (699501)	2/16/2013 10:34:34 PM
From: TopCat	Respond to of 1586810

"No wait, I didn't......." LOL

To: steve harris who wrote (699501)	2/16/2013 10:36:06 PM
From: J_F_Shepard	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1586810

You linked to a 2010 report..... Try something up to date.... opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com But there is something bigger going on here, though commentators may not be shouting about it. Health care spending is still going up, but the rate at which it grows year to year has actually been declining for about a decade now.This is truly a sea change. Look at Medicare: over the last 43 years, costs per beneficiary grew 2.7 percent faster than the overall economy. That’s why Medicare spending rose from $7.7 billion in 1970 (or 0.7 percent of gross domestic product) to $551 billion in 2012 (almost 4 percent of G.D.P.). But this trend has finally reversed; over the last three years, Medicare costs per person have grown 1.3 percent slower than growth in the overall economy. In January, a Department of Health and Human Services report showed that Medicare spending per beneficiary grew just 0.4 percent in 2012. And last week, the Congressional Budget Office lowered its 10-year Medicare spending projection by $137 billion, because “health care spending has grown much more slowly” than “historical rates would have indicated.” This slowdown is not limited to Medicare, nor is it simply the result of belt-tightening in the wake of the Great Recession. Since 2004 — nearly four years before the economic downturn — the rate of health care inflation per person has been just 0.8 percent higher than the growth of the G.D.P. Between 1965 and 1993, for comparison, it was 3.2 percent higher. So if the growth of spending is decelerating, why are premiums increasing? First, the big increases were in relatively small parts of the market, among individual and small-business policies. Second, like everyone else in the health care industry, insurance companies are uncertain about the future, particularly about what will happen to their margins when the new exchanges open in October. The natural response to uncertainty is caution, and for insurance companies, the cautious approach is to increase revenue and profits as much as possible in the short term in case Obamacare lowers them in the long term. But once the exchanges begin to facilitate competition, this fear should dissipate and premiums should come down.