Health Care Indicators Hospital, Employment, and Price Indicators for the Health Care Industry: Fourth Quarter 1995 and Annual Data for 1987-95

This regular feature of the journal includes a discussion of recent trends in health care spending, employment, and prices. The statistics presented in this arti-cle are valuable in their own right and for understanding the relationship between the health care sector and the overall economy. In addition, they allow us to anticipate the direction and magnitude of health care cost changes prior to the availability of more comprehensive data. KEY 1995 TRENDS • The hospital industry continued to shed excess capacity in 1995: The number of staffed hospital beds continued to decrease in response to continuing declines in the adult occupancy rate. • Private sector health services continued to be an important source of job creation in 1995, as the growth in health services employment continued to outpace the private non-farm sector as a whole. • Although rapid growth in home health care services seen in the early 1990s waned somewhat in 1995, as evidenced by marked deceleration in the growth of jobs in that industry, it is still the fastest growing employment sector in the health care industry. • According to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), growth in prices for all items less The authors are with the Office of the Actuary, Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA). The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect HCFA’s views or policy positions. medical care were virtually unchanged in 1995 while growth in medical prices continued to decline, though medical prices are still growing at roughly twice the rate of overall prices. • Growth in the HCFA prospective pay-ment system (PPS) input price index accelerated in 1995 for the first time in 5 years, the result of increases in non-com-pensation prices