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Tag: healthcare spending

Hospital Sector Pushes Healthcare Spending Growth Over 7%

The amount of money pumped into the healthcare system is growing at a much more rapid rate than estimated, according to first-quarter U.S. Census Bureau data.

The Census Bureau’s Quarterly Services Survey, considered one of the more accurate depictions of the U.S. economy, showed healthcare spending went up to 7.2% in the first quarter of this year compared with the same period of 2014. Hospitals spurred much of the growth—hospital spending grew 9.2% year over year.

Larry Levitt, a health policy expert at the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, tweeted that the rise in hospital revenue wasn’t due solely to volumes since hospital days rose a modest 3.5%. Prices are also going up, and hospitals are seeing patients with more complex conditions.

The new data go beyond the recent first-quarter estimates from the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, which said last month that healthcare spending increased 5.4% annually. Census data also surpass the projections from the Altarum Institute’s Center for Sustainable Health Spending, a not-for-profit organization that analyzes healthcare economics. Altarum said health expenditures increased 6.6% in the first quarter of this year.

Regardless of the final numbers, the economic figures indicate the historically low spending growth rates of the past few years appear to be firmly in the rearview mirror of the healthcare sector.

Read the full report here.

Contact Steven G. Cosby, MHSA, Group Health Insurance Broker and Agent with Cosby Insurance Group, with questions or to request more information and to schedule a healthcare plan evaluation, savings analysis or group plan solution for your company.

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Healthcare Spending Picks Up Pace in Q4

Perhaps healthcare spending is picking up again, data released Wednesday March 4, 2015, by the U.S. Census Bureau indicates.

Spending on hospitals, doctors and other providers in 2014 appears to have outpaced the slow growth rates of the past few years, according to the bureau. Healthcare spending grew at a 5.4% annual rate in the fourth quarter unadjusted for inflation or seasonal differences—a sizable difference from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s most recent estimate of 3.9% but very close to actuarial predictions from September.

The Commerce Department will revise its fourth-quarter numbers one more time, and so they could end up closer to the Census Bureau’s figures as the government incorporates more spending data.

Last year was the first full year in which millions of Americans bought health insurance through exchanges under the Affordable Care Act. The rising ranks of the insured have led many economists to predict health spending will eventually climb higher than the sluggish growth rates of the past several years. Health spending rose 3.6% in 2013, the fifth straight year of growth below 4%.

Read the full article
http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20150311/NEWS/150319978.

Contact Steven G. Cosby, MHSA with questions or to request more information and to schedule a healthcare plan evaluation, savings analysis or group plan solution for your company.

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Health Spending Continues Moderate Growth

The Bureau of Economic Analysis released its second estimate of 3rd quarter GDP and it confirms what was observed in the advanced estimate: Real growth in health spending is moderate.

Indeed, real GDP growth was revised upwards from 3.5 percent to 3.9 percent, but health spending was not really changed from the advanced estimate. In chained (2009) dollars, GDP grew by $153.7 billion in the 3rd quarter, but health care comprised only 8.6 billion of that growth (Table 3). If we go back before Obamacare kicked into high gear, the increase from the 3rd to 4th quarters in 2013 was $18.7 billion — more than twice as much, and both figures are seasonally adjusted.

Read the full article here.

Contact Steven G. Cosby, MHSA with questions or to request more information and to schedule a healthcare plan evaluation, savings analysis or group plan solution for your company.

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Health Spending on the Rise

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National health spending will increase modestly over the next decade, propelled in part by the gradual rebound of the U.S. economy and the growing ranks of Americans who became insured under the Affordable Care Act, government actuaries projected. But those growth rates are not as high as what the country saw for the two decades before the Great Recession, according to the report from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Office of the Actuary, issued Wednesday.

The actuaries estimate that health spending grew just 3.6% in 2013, the fifth year of historically low rates of spending growth. But it will accelerate to 5.6% this year. They also forecast that the average growth rate for 2015-2023 would be 6%. That is up just slightly from last year’s projection.

Read the full article here.

Contact Steven G. Cosby, MHSA with questions or to request more information and to schedule a healthcare plan evaluation, savings analysis or group plan solution for your company.

Health Care, Heating Prevent First-Quarter Contraction in U.S. GDP

The U.S. economy might have shrunk in the first quarter if not for the Affordable Care Act and spending to keep out the cold.  U.S. gross domestic product expanded a paltry 0.1% in the first three months of the year, dragged down by falling inventories and weaker exports. Spending on housing and utilities, meanwhile, contributed 0.73 percentage point to the change in GDP while spending on health care added a hefty 1.1 percentage points, the highest figure on record.  “If health-care spending had been unchanged, the headline GDP growth number would have been -1.0%,” said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics.

Read full article here.

Contact Steven Cosby with questions or to request more information and to schedule a healthcare plan evaluation, savings analysis or group plan solution for your company.

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