Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center: In Brief – Rising Costs of Health Care Coverage Continue to Put Financial Strain on Even the Privately Insured, Research Shows

BOSTON, Massachusetts, May 29 (TNSres) -- Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center issued the following news:

By 2022, the share of Americans without health insurance reached a record low of just under 8 percent. More than half the U.S. population, an estimated 180 million individuals (or 55 percent), were covered by private health insurance. However, the financial burden of health care continues to contribute to stress, poverty, debt, bankruptcy and worse health outcomes even for those with private coverage.

A new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine by investigators at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) revealed that annual total spending on health care by privately-insured families, including contributions to insurance premiums and out-of-pocket spending on medical care and prescription drugs, increased significantly between 2007 and 2019. The overall increase was driven largely by a rise in families' contributions to premiums, while out-of-pocket costs remained stable during the study period.

Corresponding author Rishi Wadhera, MD, MPPP, MPhil, associate director of the Smith Center at BIDMC and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and colleagues looked at total health care spending of more than 96,000 families with private insurance from 2007 to 2019. Among low-income families, inflation-adjusted mean total health care spending rose from $3163 in 2007 to $3247 in 2019, while higher-income families saw total health care spending rise from $4071 to $5239 during the study period. By 2019, the financial burden of medical care accounted for more than 26 percent of low-income families' post-subsistence income, which was 4-times higher than that of higher-income families (6.5 percent).

The findings highlight the need to strengthen financial safeguards for low-income families with private insurance through policies that place a stronger emphasis on regulating premiums, to alleviate the high and rising burden of health care on these families. The investigators suggest the aging population with increasing health care utilization, increasing administrative costs, specialty drug costs, and private insurers' interest in profitability are factors underlying the rising costs of premiums.

Read the full paper in JAMA Internal Medicine: Online publication date is May 28th, 10:00 AM Central Time.

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About Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is a leading academic medical center, where extraordinary care is supported by high-quality education and research. BIDMC is a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, and consistently ranks as a national leader among independent hospitals in National Institutes of Health funding. BIDMC is the official hospital of the Boston Red Sox.

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is a part of Beth Israel Lahey Health, a health care system that brings together academic medical centers and teaching hospitals, community and specialty hospitals, more than 4,700 physicians and 39,000 employees in a shared mission to expand access to great care and advance the science and practice of medicine through groundbreaking research and education.

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JOURNAL: JAMA Internal Medicine https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/2818898

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Original text here: https://www.bidmc.org/about-bidmc/news/2024/05/in-brief-rising-costs-of-health-care-coverage