Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Slowdown in Health-Care Spending to Continue?

Blinder made it pretty clear how important addressing rising healthcare costs will be in the future. We also talked about it yesterday when trying to come up with ways to balance the deficit.

This article in the WSJ has a graph that shows how spending on healthcare has decreased over the past few years and then opens up a debate. Some economists argue this fall in spending has been due to the recession while others argue that it is due to improvements in efficiency and practices. Where do you stand on the debate?

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2014/04/16/will-slowdown-in-health-care-spending-growth-persist/


4 comments:

  1. I do not know where I stand because on one hand there is the fact that there are improvements in technology towards health care. Usually improvements in technology do come with higher costs in the short run but their goal is to minimize the costs in the long run.

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  2. I concede that improvement in technology and increased efficiency could aid in mitigating healthcare costs, but I think predominantly the downward trend in spending coincides--and results from-- with the economic downturn.

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  3. Can it be a combination of both new technology and recession? I do not think there is just one factor to blame for the reduction in health care spending.

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  4. " In the recent past, new technologies added to cost." I don't know what he is exactly trying to say in this sentence. Does this mean we are not going to reduce spending on the research and development of health industry. If he is trying to imply that then I don't think so. However, I agree with Cutler on the other conclusion about technology. In case of the data for the last few years regarding health spending, I think recession was outweighing the technology factor. But, in the future if this trend continue to decrease then it would be because of the increased efficiency.

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