While health care spending rose significantly last year, the good news for consumers is the increase can be largely attribured to more people having health insurance, rather than increases in the cost of health services or medicine.
A new report from the Urban Institute, attributes roughly $39 billion in health spending last year to the 10.6 million Americans who gained health care coverage through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. That figure is lower than one put forward by the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS), which estimated that the PPACA resulted in $60 billion in additional spending last year.
Both estimates suggests that without the PPACA expansion, health care spending in 2014 would have grown at roughly the same rate as the rest of the economy, which grew 3.9 percent last year. The CMS estimate shows that health care spending rose by 3.5 percent, while, according to the the UI estimate, health spending grew by 4.1 percent.
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The data suggests that individuals are not paying much more for doctors, hospital visits or prescription drugs.
"A major reason that health spending growth has increased recently is that more people are covered," said Kathy Hempstead, who directs coverage issues at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which funded the Urban Institute report. "While increased spending on specialty drugs is a concern, other health service prices appear to be holding the line."
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