Hans wrote:
I read that link and the scandal is the fraudulent fudging of numbers. Surely it happens everywhere, everybody in my early chem labs fudged all their data to get somewhere plausibly near the expected result!
I like your posts, but sorry, my personal health care premiums will be increasing 42% next year, and the deductible and max out of pocket are increasing from $2k to $10k, and that's the same story with everybody in the tech park where I work, across about 25 different medium-sized businesses. I think that working people's health care costs are skyrocketing.
sorry to hear your costs are going up but that is not the story nationwide. Cost increases are pretty much at the general inflation rate, far, far less than the 5-7% growth rates of the past. Although I may be conflating overall costs with premiums.
Clearly, big,big things are happening in health care that is reducing the long term costs of health care. Between the lower cost of energy and the lower cost of health care increases....pretty much everything that we have thought inevitable....isn't anymore.
But here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/upshot/latest-good-news-in-health-spending-employer-premiums.html?abt=0002&abg=1"We’re in the midst of a rare slowdown in the growth of health spending. That slowdown just hit the employer health insurance market.
On Wednesday, the Kaiser Family Foundation published its annual survey on the health plans that employers are offering their workers. It’s large and comprehensive and generally regarded as the most reliable measure of what’s happening in the employer market.
The big finding is that the growth in health insurance premiums was only 3 percent between 2013 and 2014. That’s tied for the lowest rate of increase since Kaiser started measuring (this is the 16th year of the survey).
For the past few years, health spending as measured in all kinds of ways has been encouraging. Spending growth in Medicare and Medicaid are down. National health spending is down. But employer health premiums were a little slower to catch on."
and here:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/some-good-news-on-health-careSince 2010, according to a new report by the White House Council of Economic Advisers, inflation-adjusted per-capita health-care spending has been rising at an annual rate of just 1.3 per cent. Depending on which index of prices you look at, that’s the lowest rate of increase in forty or fifty years. The slowdown in spending growth has extended across all the big categories (hospital care, physician and clinical services, prescription drugs, home health/nursing care) and across all types of health plans (private insurance, Medicare, and Medicaid). It’s a big deal.