United States health spending in 2015 rose at its fastest rate since 2007, driven by expanded access to insurance under the Affordable Care Act and high-priced specialty drugs, according to government figures released on Friday.
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That’s faster than in 2014, when overall health spending rose 5.3%. Most of that is spent by the very sickest patients, but that is still a staggering total nonetheless. Private insurance continues to be the major US payer for health care, accounting for one-third of all health care spending in 2015 and 2014. By 2015, almost 91% was. “If you don’t solve the cost problem, it will undercut coverage expansions because they get too expensive”.
National health expenditures grew at a rate of 5.8% over the year, more than the 5.5% estimated by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in future spending projections offered this summer. Once repeal is passed and insurers know the system is going away at some point, they have less incentive to stick it out in ObamaCare in the interim. Our health care system will work best if there are no individual or company mandates. That was followed by households (28 percent), businesses (20 percent), and state and local governments (17 percent). In doing the analysis, the HHS experts count the employee share of premiums for job-based insurance as spending by households. Among GOP voters, it increased to 24%, up from 11%. That stems not only from rising coverage through the health law but also an aging population, which is expanding Medicare.
The poll found majorities across party lines support numerous health care law’s provisions, but not its requirement that individuals have coverage or risk fines, and its mandate that medium-to-large employers pay fines if they don’t offer health insurance. More notably, spending on Medicaid expenditures grew by 9.7% and by 9.0% for retail prescription drugs.
The number of new customers who have submitted an application and selected a health care plan through Healthcare.gov is down by nearly 200,000 from a year ago, according to the latest open enrollment figures released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Americans paid $324.6 billion for retail prescription drugs past year mainly because of increased spending for generic medications, costly new drugs and price hikes for existing brand-name drugs. Medicare enrollment reached 54.3 million past year, up 2.7 percent from 2014.
All this would cut costs for the federal government – the Congressional Budget Office estimated that Price’s Medicaid proposal would reduce federal spending by $1 trillion over a decade, effectively reducing the program’s budget by a third in the final year of that period.
Former White House official Ezekiel Emanuel said that’s partly due to the Obama administration’s stewardship.
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, also said Washington should make fewer decisions while states make more.
And Republicans have exploited it as a potent symbol of what they have said is Obamacare’s unsafe expansion of government.
But the new report indicates that the latest increase – which tracks with a similar uptick in 2014 – was fueled by increased use of health care, likely caused by the health law, often called Obamacare.
Children and grandchildren don’t have to worry about their parents and grandparents being overwhelmed by exorbitant health care costs in the private market. That increases your purchasing power and would give groups more leverage to negotiate with insurers for lower prices. They’ve sworn to defend Obamacare, no matter what it costs you.
Wasden outlined his estimate of how repeal would change the financial side of health care during a special meeting of the Health Affairs Committee of the UM Board of Curators.
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In 2014, CNN reported one of many cases where Obamacare went wrong.
