Use of Doctors, Hospitals Down, but Healthcare Spending Still up Slightly in 2010

It might not seem like it, with people delaying hospital care, doctor’s visits and prescription drug purchases for the second year in a row. But national health spending actually rose a slight 3.9 percent in 2010, according to a story by Robert Pear.

Pear writes that a recent report by the federal government noted that the recession pulled down the growth of health spending, “as many people lost jobs, income and health insurance.” The study was published in the journal Health Affairs.

Continuing pressure from the recession and its after-effects lowered the growth of health spending, which totaled $2.6 trillion, or 17.9 percent of the economy, in 2010, according to the government’s annual study of health trends, according to Pear.

And in a move that does not bode well for consumers, for the first time in seven years, total private health insurance premiums grew faster than insurers’ spending on health care benefits, the administration said, according to Pear. Premiums totaled almost a billion dollars more – $849 billion – than what was spent on benefits – $746 billion, in 2010.

Pear adds that, in the past, the rise in health expenditures outstripped the growth of the economy.  “But in 2010 growth rates were similar, so that health care accounted for the same share of total economic output in 2009 and 2010,” he writes. 

“U.S. health spending grew more slowly in 2009 and 2010” than at any other time in the 51 years the government has been collecting such data, said Anne B. Martin, an economist in the office of the actuary at the Department of Health and Human Services, according to Pear.

Cmio.com reports that Martin said that what caused the slowdown in healthcare spending “included an extended period of high unemployment and the lowest median inflation-adjusted income since 1996”.

But Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar writes at huffingtonpost.com that experts are considering whether it's a consequence of the sluggish economy, “or a real sign that cost controls by private employers and government at all levels are starting to work”.

But the news isn’t all bad. According to Pear, while the recession trimmed spending by consumers, employers and state and local governments, the federal government was pitched in to balance things out.

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