blog assignment #6

The economic recession has been the major effect on the health care system. Along with the economic recession, the congress is legislating helath care policies that can greatly affect the health care system; therefore, private and public health spending, or both, seem to change dynamically. The article that we are reading this week offered projections for private, public and national health spending. These projections were based on 2009 medicare trustees Report and total health spending is expected to grow faster after 2010 because of expected increase in personal income along with the economic recovery. Also as baby boommer generation move from private coverage to medicare, the private spending growth will seem to slow down, where as public spending growth will acclerate. Surprisingly, health spending is expected to grow to 4.5 trillion by 2019. However, public health spending seems to increase to 52 percent of all health spending by 2019 because of continued influence of the recession and possible demographic changes.The author of the article says, these projections do not include health care reform proposals and defense appropriations act, which extended COBRA coverage subsidization andlimited Medicare physician payment rates. Two primary factors that affect personal health care spending (purchase of health care products and services) are medical prices and utilization. Medical prices are influsenced by economywide factors. Then the author looks at various insurance payers: medicare, medicaid, private health insurance companies and people's out of pocket spending. As mentioned above, the author believes medicare spending growht will be expected to average 7.4 percent due to the baby boomers despite 21.3 percent reduction in physician payement rate recetly. The federal and state Medicaid is at its fastest growth rate for now; this is a result of rising unemployment. The article says, however, the medicaid spending growth seems to slow to 7 percent by 2012 as the economy improves. Another cause in increase of medicaid spending is increased number of the aged in the program; they tend to be more costly than other age groups. Due to reduction in the number of people with private health insurace, private health insruace premiums comparably increase. The article projects premium growth to reach 7.1 percent by 2015. At the same time, the services that require out-of-pocket costs are in less demand; enrollemnt growth in medicaid seems to increase.
Continued increases in healthcare spending and continued proportional increases in public spending suggest that the health care system in the united states is not working out efficiently, despite high demand of health care services, first of all. Also, as mentioned above, increases in pulbic spedning opposed to private insurance spending indicates that the economic recession is still influencing health care system. I think the most pressing issues for health care reform should be educating people about insurance and how being uninsured can actually lead to higher costs and how it can affect the society.