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Medical Spending Continues
to Rise A
feature story in the January 9, 2004 issue of the Boston Globe highlights
just how expensive medical care is in the United States. According to the
article medical expenses climbed at a much higher rate than the rest of
the US economy. The article reports that according to the Centers for
Medicare & Medicaid Services, which tracks health care spending annually,
employers,
consumers, and government programs such as Medicaid spent $1.6 trillion,
or $5,400 per person, in 2002 on medical care, a 9.3 percent jump over the
previous year.
The major factor driving
up the nation's health care bill was spending on hospital services.
According to the article Americans spent 9.5 percent more on hospital care
over the previous year. This trend is partly because patients underwent
more surgery and had more MRIs and other expensive diagnostic tests in
2002.
The study, originally
published in the journal Health Affairs, said that consumers spent $212.5
billion out of their own pockets on co-payments and deductibles for
hospital stays, doctors' appointments, and prescription drugs. This
represented a 6 percent increase from 2001. The total of consumers'
personal spending accounted for just 14 percent of overall health care
costs.
Joseph Newhouse, a
professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public
Health observes, "The one thing we can say is the savings we had from
managed care in the mid-1990s is a thing of the past. The question the
study doesn't answer, however, is whether the increased spending bought
patients better health. In other words, was it worth it? Over long
periods of time you can show the benefits of increased spending, but in
any one given year, who knows?"
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