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Saturday, January 26, 2013

Who Knew? Patients’ Share Of Health Spending Is Shrinking

By Jay Hancock
KHN Staff Writer
Originally published January 13, 2013

Consumer-driven medical spending may be the second-biggest story in health care, after the Affordable Care Act. As employers give workers more "skin in the game" through higher costs from purse and paycheck, the thinking goes, they'll seek more efficient treatment and hold down overall spending.

But consumers may not have as much skin in the game as experts thought, new government figures show.

Despite rapid growth in high-deductible health plans and rising employee contributions for insurance premiums, consumers' share of national health spending continued to fall in 2011, slipping to its lowest level in decades.

"I'm surprised," says Jonathan Gruber, a health economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "All the news is about the move to high-deductible health plans. Based on that logic … I would have expected it to go up."

True, medical costs are still pressuring families. Household health expense has outpaced sluggish income growth in recent years, says Micah Hartman, a statistician with the Department of Health and Human Services, which calculates the spending data.

But from a wider perspective, consumer health costs continued a trend of at least a quarter-century of taking up smaller and smaller parts of the health-spending pie. Household expense did go up. But other medical spending rose faster, especially for the government Medicare and Medicaid programs.

The entire article is here.