Health Care Indicators

This regular feature of the journal includes a discussion of recent trends in health care delivery, employment, and prices. The statistics presented in this article are valuable in their own right for understanding the relationship between the health care sector and the overall economy. In addition, they allow us to antici-pate the direction and magnitude of health care cost changes prior to the availability of more comprehensive data. Beginning with this issue, the article will include statistics not pre-sented before on hospital operations and on the change in health care prices, with particular attention to the Medicare population. KEY FIRST-QUARTER 1995 TRENDS • Hospital utilization increased sharply as admissions, surgical operations, and out-patient visits increased at the fastest rate in 10 years. Growth in each of these three measures accelerated in each of the past 3 quarters. • Hospital admissions for the population 65 years of age or over increased 5.2 per-cent from the first quarter of 1994, one of the largest increases in the last 10 years. • Employment in home health care serv-ices, the fastest-growing sector in the health care industry, continued to grow at a rate nearly four times faster than employment in the private non-farm business sector. • The economy slowed, as gross domestic product (GDP) growth decelerated, and economywide price increases were moderate. • Consumer prices for medical commodi-ties increased less than overall con-sumer prices, the second time this occurred in the last 3 quarters. • Prices for hospital services for Medicare and Medicaid patients, as measured by the producer price index (PPI), increased less than prices for hospital services for all other patients. 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