It is a sweeping trend that should mean bigger paychecks for middle-class households and hundreds of billions of dollars in savings for the government. Yet, only 1 in 20 Americans is aware of it.
Nationally, spending on health care is growing at the slowest pace ever recorded. Annual spending on health care often grew more than 10 percent a year during the 1970s and ’80s. Growth dipped in the 1990s, only to rise again, but starting in the early 2000s the rate began falling. It is now just about 4 percent a year.
Yet in the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, just 5 percent of all Americans – and 3 percent of uninsured respondents – said that health-care spending had moderated. Half of respondents said that costs had been going up at a faster rate lately.
That might be in part because Americans are paying more out of pocket for their health care. For instance, deductibles – the amount a covered individual has to pay for health care before the plan kicks in to cover the remaining costs – have become more common and more expensive.
The percentage of Americans enrolled in a health plan with a deductible of at least $1,000 has climbed to 38 percent in 2013 from 18 percent in 2008, according to a recent survey by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. During the same period, the average deductible has increased to $1,097 from $735.
Normally, that moderation in health spending would mean that households would receive higher wages: Businesses spending less on health premiums would spend more on salaries and bonuses, as happened in the 1990s, economists said.
But, because of the weak economy and high rates of unemployment, employers have not felt pressured to increase wages, leaving households struggling with stagnant earnings and bigger out-of-pocket health costs, which explains why the national spending slowdown remains invisible to them.
