Interesting blog from The Commonwealth Fund: New estimates released recently by the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) show that annual growth in U.S. health care spending increased to 5.3 percent in 2014, up from 2.9 percent in 2013, after five consecutive years of historically low growth. The increase was driven in part by the fact that 8.7 million more Americans had health insurance in 2014 under the coverage expansions of the Affordable Care Act and used their insurance to get care. The other significant driver of spending was rapid growth in prescription drug spending, reflecting in part the introduction of new and expensive hepatitis C drugs. In their blog post, the authors took a look at both factors.
Read full blog post: http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/blog/2015/dec/new-us-health-care-spending-estimates