Study: Higher prices for care may be driving health-care costs - Politico

A new study could pose a challenge to the basic premise of President Barack Obama's approach to controlling health costs — that spending will come down if doctors don't give patients as much unnecessary medical care.

The study from the Health Care Cost Institute found that costs rose 3.3 percent in 2010 even though people actually used fewer services in many categories. Spending grew not because there were a lot of unnecessary procedures and treatments but rather because the services themselves got more expensive.

As HCCI Chairman Martin Gaynor put it, "People weren't getting more care, but people [were] paying more for it."

The HCCI is a new project pulling together one of the largest troves of data ever assembled on health care spending by people with private insurance. The new information is likely to add to experts' understanding of what drives health care costs, since much of what is already known comes from Medicare — which makes its claims data available to researchers but doesn't show much about how younger people use care or about how the private market drives costs.

The HCCI got four of the nation's largest insurers — Aetna, Humana, Kaiser Permanente and UnitedHealthcare — to fork over massive amounts of records about what's driving spending among people under age 65. This first study is based on a review of 3 billion claims for people with employer-sponsored insurance filed in a single year.

The first study covers only one year, so researchers caution that it's hard to know exactly what caused the patterns they saw. But what they have found so far is likely to draw a lot of attention.

21 May, 2012