Heath Care Costs Relative To Inflation Over The Past 20 Years In America

Heath Care Costs Relative To Inflation Over the Past 20 Years in America

Introduction

Health care accounts for a remarkably large slice of the U.S. economic pie. Each year health-related spending grows, often outpacing spending on other goods and services, meaning that the size of that slice also increases. These cost increases have a significant effect on the way households, businesses, and government agencies conduct their affairs. Among other things, health inflation puts pressure on businesses who offer insurance coverage to their employees, inhibits individuals from purchasing their own coverage, can be a major financial burden to families, and takes an increasing share of government budgets and taxpayer dollars.

Discussion

This paper gives a brief glimpse of available data on health care costs, and summarizes the impact of spending growth on various parts of society. The National Health Expenditure Accounts (NHE), which is the source for several of the analyses below, present the costs of care by type, such as hospital care, physician services, or prescription drugs, and also show spending by payer, such as the amount contributed by private insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, or the individual patient. Results from both the Kaiser Family Foundation/Health Research and Educational Trust Employer Health Benefits Survey and the Medical Expenditures Panel Survey are also shown to help explain how health costs are distributed among families. Finally, we conclude by discussing some commonly-held explanations for why health care costs have grown over time

The struggle for average Americans to keep up is largely becoming an act of will power and force in this current grand recession.  Now you wouldn't think that there is a definite war raging against the middle class if you simply follow the mainstream media but the facts speak to a more distilled and corporatized method of debt slavery.  Americans are working more hours trying to stay in the same place that they believe would keep them on pace to having the American Dream.  And this dream is merely the ability to afford a home, provide your children with a good education (public or private), and save enough to have a retirement that doesn't require you to eat cat food after a lifetime of working.  That is at the root of what most average Americans would want after a full working career.

But we are at an inflexion point and the middle class is largely being squeezed out.  A recent study from the Commerce Department shed some light on an issue that we already know.  Over the past 20 years the middle class has been falling behind:

Everything is relative in this world.  Incomes have gone up during this time but the cost of housing, healthcare, and access to education have outpaced income gains in some cases by four to one.  Money is only worth what you can buy with it.  The grand housing bubble of this decade lured many into buying homes that they simply could not ...