Tag: OECD

Healthcare Spending Growth Rate is Slowing Down in the US

Though expenditure previously increased at a high yearly rate, the growth in healthcare spending has slowed down to a great extent in the past decade. This is a new report revealed by The Lancet.  More than any country in the world, the US expends more on healthcare per capita. This report may come as surprising news since a great deal of reforms have been put into place recently to stretch healthcare coverage across the nation which led  to the reduction of the number of people with no medical insurance.  In a comparison made by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) about the spending and policies of the US along with five other high-spending countries, they found out that America’s spending growth rate dropped to 1% in the last 10 years which is almost the same as the average growth rate in other countries.

According to Luca Lorenzoni, author of the study, the disparity in healthcare spending between the US and the other countries with the same level of income could be due to health sector prices for hospital care and prescription medicines, among others, that are comparatively higher in the US. The gains made in the reduction of healthcare spending can be caused by the price movement, for example, the increased utilization of affordable drugs and the cutback on growth in physician reimbursement rates, the authors concluded.

The OECD is an international group whose aim is to “promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world.” According to them, further economic recovery could bring unfavorable effect on the slowing down of health care spending. The progress found in the study is no reason to be confident in this area. They suggest measures including price controls on Medicare and Medicaid should be considered to avoid potential increases in costs caused by an improving economy.

What Makes Healthcare Expensive?

Since 1900, the average American life span has improved by 30 years, or by 62%. That nugget comes near the beginning of a new review taking stock of the U.S. healthcare program, released in the Journal of the American Medical Association this week and it’s also pretty much the last piece of great news in it. The study authors a mixture of experts from Alerion Advisors, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Rochester and the Boston Consulting Group take a point-by-point look at why medical care costs so much, why our results are relatively poor and what accounts for the increase in medical expenses. In the process, they revealed a number of amazing facts that debunk popular misunderstandings about health investing.

Actually, serious illnesses such as cardiovascular illness and diabetic issues, among patients younger than 65 pushes two-thirds of medical spending. About 85% of medical expenses are spent on individuals younger than 65, though individuals do spend more on healthcare as they age. “Between 2000 and 2011, increase in price (particularly of drugs, medical devices and medical center care), not concentration of service or market change, produced most of the increase in health’s share of GDP,” the writers write.

The biggest-spending disease with the quickest amount of development was hyperlipidemia, high cholesterol and triglycerides for which investing improved by 14.4% yearly between 2000 and 2010. This is a regular factor that Obama-Care competitors make when suggesting for the status quo, but in fact, much of the southeastern U.S. has a life span that is lower than average for the OECD, a set of developing nations that is commonly used for evaluation. And while People in America amount their encounters with the U.S. healthcare program as generally positive, other nations within the OECD are just as pleased, even though their medical care is much less expensive than ours.