How skyrocketing hospital and drug prices are driving up insurance costs

Bob covers healthcare money, focusing on health insurance and hospitals. His stories delve into Medicare Advantage, opaque prescription drug benefits, and real executive pay. He is also the author of the Health Care Inc. newsletter. You can reach Bob on Signal at bobjherman.09.

Workers and employers are drowning in health insurance premiums. The reason for this deluge: the high and impenetrable prices of the health care sector.

Health insurers do not set their premiums in a vacuum. The most important factor is the care people receive. And the biggest factor that determines the cost of that care, according to STAT, is not how often people go to the hospital or doctor, but the runaway prices charged by all sectors of the health care industry, which workers and businesses are often powerless to stop.

For Gerard Anderson, high prices in the United States are as obvious, but as imperceptible, as the oxygen we breathe. He has studied health care spending and policy for the past four decades, even helping to design the Medicare hospital payment system in the 1980s. He co-authored a seminal paper in 2003, and again in 2019, that exposed the culprit behind America’s outlier health spending numbers: “It’s prices, stupid.” »

“Some things don’t change,” Anderson, the Johns Hopkins professor, told STAT.