Health care spending to accelerate, US report says

NEW YORK The U.S. authorities expects healthcare spending to extend by 5.8 % yearly on average from 2014 through 2024 as extra Americans achieve insurance coverage protection and the improved financial system drives sufferers to go to docs and hospitals.

Health care spending is once again growing faster than the economy, surpassing $3.1 trillion last year and heading into a decade of increases likely to average 5.8 percent a year, federal health economists said Monday.

Healthcare spending grew faster in 2014 than the previous five years partly because of a strengthening economy and coverage expansions through Obamacare. In some cases, patients discover after a surgery that a member of their medical team was not in their approved network and are forced to pay out-of-pocket for that care.

Medicaid spending growth is projected to slow to 8.2 percent in 2015, down from 12.0 percent in 2014, primarily reflecting slower enrollment growth after the initial surge in 2014. Overall, however, growth rates over the next decade are expected to be much slower than the 9 percent average annual growth rate for the three decades prior to the economic recession, according to the report. The study’s authors said they believed, however, that the long-term impact of prescription drug spending will be minimal.

That’s what a study of health care spending trends by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services says.

People enrolled in the Medicare and Medicaid programs have higher medical costs than average Americans.

He acknowledged that if new and expensive drugs are released in coming years it could be a cause for why spending in the report might be under-projected. “And even with new treatments for Hepatitis C, high cholesterol, and cancer, the federal government is projecting that the spending going to medicine will continue to be approximately 10 percent through 2024, which is the same share it was 1960”.

As taxpayers, Americans benefited from the slowdown, which reduced projected Medicare costs.

That’s far more than last year’s estimated spending of $3.08 trillion, which includes all government, business and household spending on healthcare. By the 2019 to 2024 period, it is expected to average 7.9 percent.

“The fact that spending was so low for so long makes people think it won’t come back all the way to where it was before”, says David Cutler, a health economist at Harvard and former adviser to the Obama administration. An aging population means older and sicker Medicare beneficiaries who will need more services, and more intense medical attention. The number of enrollees is increasing each year, as 19.1 million baby boomers are expected to age into the program. The report estimates the numbers assuming that 55 percent of states expand Medicaid by 2017 and beyond.