“Persistently high unemployment, continued loss of private health insurance coverage, and increased cost sharing led some people to forgo care or seek less costly alternatives than they would have otherwise used,” economists and statisticians with the agency wrote. “As a result, growth in the use and intensity of health care goods and services in 2010 accounted for a much smaller share of personal health care spending growth than in previous years.”
The authors also said that government financing of health care grew from about 41cq percent in 2007 to 45cq percent in 2010.
Notable in the report is that increases in health services, typically cited as the cause of rising health costs, made up only a fraction of the increase, Robert Pear of the New York Times reports:
In 2010, the study said, hospitals reported a decline in admissions and slower growth in emergency room visits and outpatient visits. Likewise, it said, doctor’s office visits declined, and spending for doctors’ services grew just 1.8 percent, to $416 billion in 2010. Total health spending averaged $8,402 a person, up 3.1 percent from 2009, the report said.
Doctors often prescribe drugs during office visits, and the decline in visits helped slow the growth of drug spending, as did the use of lower-cost generic medications. The number of prescriptions filled rose just 1.2 percent in 2010, and total retail spending on prescription drugs also grew 1.2 percent, to $259 billion, the slowest rate of growth in a half-century, the report said.
For the first time in seven years, total private health insurance premiums grew faster than insurers’ spending on health care benefits, the administration said. Premiums totaled $849 billion in 2010, while spending on benefits totaled $746 billion. The difference includes administrative costs and profits.
