No single government report more reliably generates editorials on the nation’s healthcare “crisis” than the annual CMS actuary’s report on US health spending. I’ve long suspected that a lot of these editorials, like obituaries, are written in advance, so that the editorialist can simply fill in the new numbers. A two-decade long accumulation of these editorials has driven the political narrative that health costs are “out of control”.
This year, however, the editorial dogs failed to bark. On January 5, the CMS actuary report on health spending for the year 2008 revealed a 4.4% increase in national health spending, the lowest rate of increase since end of the Eisenhower administration. Since we experienced nearly 1% population growth during 2008, per capita spending grew in the mid 3% range.
CMS cited fading demand for prescription drugs, hospital inpatient services and physician services as major contributors, as well as a decline in the number of privately insured lives. Retail outlet sales of medical items grew by 0.5%, and per capita use of prescription drugs actually declined modestly. CMS concluded that “the current economic recession appears to have exerted considerable influence on the health sector in 2008”.
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