{"id":138471,"date":"2010-01-05T00:02:32","date_gmt":"2010-01-05T05:02:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.wsj.com\/health\/2010\/01\/05\/another-way-to-look-at-those-health-spending-numbers\/"},"modified":"2010-01-05T00:02:32","modified_gmt":"2010-01-05T05:02:32","slug":"another-way-to-look-at-those-health-spending-numbers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/138471","title":{"rendered":"Another Way to Look at Those Health-Spending Numbers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Pig\"The headline on that health-spending report<\/a> in the news<\/a> today is “Health-Spending Growth at a Historic Low in 2008.” That’s true as far as it goes — growth increased at a rate of 4.4%, the slowest rate in the past 48 years. <\/p>\n

But an arguably more important figure to keep an eye on is national health-care spending as a percentage of total GDP. If health-care spending rose at the same rate as GDP, we could leave the current system in place and be fine (at least in a macroeconomic sense). But because health-care spending is rising faster than GDP, we are spending an ever-larger portion of our national income on health care.<\/p>\n

So what happened with health-care spending as a percentage of total GDP in 2008? Not only did it rise — it rose at a faster rate than in recent years. In 2005, health-care spending accounted for 15.7% of GDP. It rose to 15.8% in 2006, and 15.9% in 2007. Then, in 2008, it jumped to 16.2% of GDP.<\/p>\n

That happened because, even though the growth of health-care spending slowed in 2008, overall GDP growth slowed a lot more. This is typical during economic downturns: The paper notes that “larger increases in the health spending share of GDP generally occur during or just after periods of economic recession.” (The authors are based at CMS, the government agency that runs Medicare and Medicaid.)<\/p>\n

This makes sense on an intuitive level, because people may keep paying for health care even when they cut back on other spending. What’s more, the federal government — always a big payer via Medicare and Medicaid — upped its contribution as well. Federal spending for health services and supplies grew sharply in 2008, up 10.4%, according to the paper, which was published in the journal Health Affairs.<\/p>\n

One final note: Most of the increase in 2008 was due to higher prices, not due to population growth or more use of health-care service, according to the analysis.<\/p>\n

Image: iStockphoto<\/em><\/p>\n

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The headline on that health-spending report in the news today is “Health-Spending Growth at a Historic Low in 2008.” That’s true as far as it goes — growth increased at a rate of 4.4%, the slowest rate in the past 48 years. But an arguably more important figure to keep an eye on is national […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":650,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-138471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/650"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}