Are health care costs going down, up or nowhere?

From the Wall Street Journal, May 7, 2013

Two new economic analyses suggest a recent slowdown in health-spending growth may reflect lasting change due to fundamental shifts in how health care is delivered and paid for.

The findings come as economists and policy experts debate whether the damped growth is a temporary phenomenon tied to the recession and its aftermath or is more linked to permanent changes, such as increased efficiency among health-care providers.

The implications for the economy and the federal budget are huge, since health-care costs make up a significant share of both. Health spending represented 17.9% of the gross domestic product in 2011.

The studies, appearing in the journal Health Affairs, take different approaches. One looked at spending on health care for about 10 million to 12 million people who had insurance through large employers between 2007 and 2011—an approach that sought to cancel out the recession’s job-loss effects on health coverage.

The analysis found that spending growth even among employer plans dropped in 2010 and remained relatively low in 2011. About 20% of the effect was due to increased deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs that workers faced, the authors found. The rest, they suggested, might reflect slower spreading of new health-care technology or more conservative care patterns by providers.

So, the year Obamacare was enacted automatically changed care patterns … instantly … and permanently? Ah, not so much. It would be nice if the health care system suddenly became efficient and each physician changed his way of practicing health care… someday maybe.

I should mention another recent study attributed the slowing of costs mostly to the economy, who knows, but logic would tell us that we have yet to see any fundamental changes to cause a lasting change. What we have seen is cost-shifting to workers and higher costs from new mandates.