What are the latest health care indicators?
What are the latest health care indicators?
National group examines trends in health care
The National Health Statistics Group reports regularly on current trends in health care through the analysis of data on such subjects as employment, prices, health care spending, and the nation’s economic activity. In its most recent report "Hospital, Employment and Price Indicators for the Health Care Industry: 2nd Quarter," the group found the following key trends:
• The recent declines in home health care services employment have slowed, as employment fell 3.3% in the second quarter of 1999, compared to the same period in 1998. This followed declines of 8.1% and 6.6% in the fourth quarter of 1998 and the first quarter of 1999, respectively. Home health employment and payroll decreases began in early 1998, following public sector actions to control Medicare spending growth and ongoing actions to detect fraud and abuse.
• Home health’s employment decrease of 3.3% in the second quarter of 1999 is less severe than those experienced over the previous four quarters. This suggests that the brunt of industry’s reaction to the implementation of Medicare spending controls in the fourth quarter of 1997 is attenuating. The rapid employment growth between 1988 and 1993 began to slow after the first quarter of 1994; actual decreases began in the first quarter of 1998. These declines followed public sector actions to control Medicare spending and continuing actions to detect fraud and abuse activities.
• Employment in all private and government hospitals rose by 1.1% in the second quarter of 1999, driven by a 1.2% increase in private hospital employment and a 2.1% increase in local government hospital employment. Employment in state government hospitals rose for the first time since the third quarter of 1992, while employment in federal government hospitals continued to decline.
• Medical services price growth has leveled off in the past few quarters but continued to outpace growth in overall prices during the second quarter of 1999, including recent energy price increases.
• While hospital inpatient and outpatient producer prices have grown at similar rates over the past few years, the underlying patterns of growth by payer type have been markedly different. Prices for inpatient services increased at a slower rate for public payers than for all other payers, but increased at a faster rate than for all other payers for outpatient services.
• Nursing home price growth continued to decelerate in the second quarter of 1999, moving closer to the growth in input prices in the industry.
The above information is from the Office of the Actuary, Health Care Financing Administration in Baltimore.
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