US Healthcare Costs Continue to Rise, But At Declining Rates According to the S&P Healthcare Economic Indices

S&P Indices
May 19, 2011

David M. Blitzer, Chairman of the Index Committee at Standard & Poor’s:

“If you look over the last year or so of data, it is apparent that the rates of increase in health care costs continue to slow down. While there was some volatility within months, the general trend has been a slowdown across all nine of the indices we publish. Most of the annual growth rates peaked in the late winter/early spring of 2010. Since then, most of these rates have fallen by 2 percentage points or more. The biggest slowdown has come from the Hospital Medicare Index, where the annual growth rate fell from +8.30% in August 2009 to +1.18% in March 2011. On the other hand, we have not seen an equal trend for the Hospital Commercial Index, where the annual growth rate peaked at +9.36% in May 2010, and is still reporting a healthy +8.36% as of March 2011. This phenomenon could be the possible result of two things: (1) costs for Medicare patients are being better contained than those covered under commercial insurance plans and (2) hospitals are using more procedures and services covered under commercial plans, contributing to the increase in total costs. We see a similar differential across the Professional Services Indices, but not as severe.”

For the past several years, the trend of medical costs funded by commercial insurance plans is significantly greater than those funded by Medicare.

Click on this link for two graphs dramatically demonstrating these differences:
http://www.standardandpoors.com/servlet/BlobServer?blobheadername3=MDT-Type&blobcol=urldocumentfile&blobtable=SPComSecureDocument&blobheadervalue2=inline%3B+filename%3Ddownload.pdf&blobheadername2=Content-Disposition&blobheadervalue1=application%2Fpdf&blobkey=id&blobheadername1=content-type&blobwhere=1245305077461&blobheadervalue3=abinary%3B+charset%3DUTF-8&blobnocache=true

We frequently see reports that attempt to explain away the findings that medical costs funded by private commercial insurance plans are significantly greater than those funded by Medicare. This report from Standard and Poor’s leaves absolutely no doubt that the difference is not only real, but it is very significant.

Just to show how different the people on Wall Street think, the Hospital Commercial Index is reported as “a healthy +8.36% as of March 2011.” Leave it to Wall Street gurus to declare that extremely high private sector (commercially insured) health care cost increases are “healthy.” You would think that businesses paying commercial rates rather than Medicare rates would take notice.