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Valentine's Day is the second-most popular day to pop the question, and millions of couples are expected to get engaged today. According to The Knot's 2017 Jewelry and Engagement Study, the average national cost for an engagement ring in the U.S. is $6,351, just under $1,000 more than average national health care spending per person ($5,407 in 2016). And just like average health care costs, the av...

By: Chris Isidore  Amazon is partnering with Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase, the nation's largest bank, to try to address one of the nation's thorniest and priciest problems -- soaring health care costs. The three companies unveiled an as yet unnamed company to give their U.S. workers and families a better option on health insurance. The statement said the new company will be...

 By: Jessie Hellman Health-care spending has increased because prices are rising, not because Americans are using more health care, according to a new study released Tuesday. The report from the Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI) showed that total health-care spending grew by 4.6 percent per person from 2015 to 2016 even as utilization of services remained steady, or declined in some cases. As...

By: Jeanne Whalen Spending on health care accelerated in 2016 for Americans who get insurance through work, even as use of most health-care services declined or remained flat. The reason, according to a new report: price increases. Rising prices for prescription drugs, surgery, emergency-room visits and other services drove a 4.6% increase in total spending per person, versus 4.1% in 2015 and less...

​Fewer women are getting hysterectomies in every state across the country. Instead, more patients may be choosing minimally invasive procedures or other alternatives to handle issues like pelvic pain and fibroids over a traditional abdominal hysterectomy, new Michigan Medicine research suggests. The rate of hysterectomies in the U.S. decreased 12 percent between 2010 and 2013, from nearly 40 ...

By: Sam Baker Health care spending is up. Way up. That's because prices are up — not because we're using more health care, according to newly published data from the Health Care Cost Institute. The numbers that matter: Health care spending grew by 4.5% from 2015 to 2016, yet utilization was steady — or, in some cases, actually declined — during the same period. According to HCCI's analysis, which ...

By: Daniel Chang Most Americans have health coverage through their jobs, but that doesn't mean they are better off when it comes to spending for their care, according to a five-year analysis of billions of insurance claims by the nonprofit Health Care Cost Institute. In a study published Tuesday, HCCI found that working Americans used less healthcare but paid more for it every year from 2012 to 20...

By: Dan Diamond Indiana is abuzz with news that the Trump administration this week will approve the state's pending Medicaid waiver, which would add a work requirement for able-bodied adults, multiple sources tell POLITICO's Rachana Pradhan. Indiana's pioneering conservative Medicaid model — which CMS Administrator Seema Verma helped develop as a consultant and then-Gov. Mike Pence used to expand ...

 By Robert Preidt Americans spent more on health care in 2016, even though their use of health care did not increase, and rising costs are the reason why, a new report shows. "It is time to have a national conversation on the role of price increases in the growth of health care spending," said Niall Brennan, president of the Health Care Cost Institute. The institute is a non-partisan, nonprof...

By: Carolyn Johnson Americans who get health insurance through their jobs are not using more medical care than they were five years ago, but they are spending more due to soaring medical prices, according to a new report. Health spending for the more than 150 million people who receive insurance through their employers was $5,407 per person in 2016. That is a 4.6 percent increase over 2015, even t...

​Among disabled Medicare beneficiaries, county-level socioeconomic factors are associated with opioid prescriptions, with more prescriptions seen with lower socioeconomic indicators, according to a study published in the January issue of Medical Care. Chao Zhou, Ph.D., from the Health Care Cost Institute in Washington, D.C., and colleagues examined opioid prescriptions of disabled Medicare benefic...

Spending on emergency department (ED) facility fees rose steadily between 2009 and 2015, even as the overall number of ED fees billed declined, according to an analysis of Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI) data, Sarah Kliff writes for Vox. However, the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) is pushing back against the findings, noting that the analysis examined only spending by employer-s...

 By: Les Masterson Dive Brief: Hospital emergency room (ER) facility fees increased 89% between 2009 and 2015, which is twice as fast as outpatient care and four times as fast as overall healthcare spending, reported Vox and Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI) in a new report.Vox and HCCI analyzed 70 million insurance bills for ER visits. The analysis focused on facility fees and not the hospit...

By: Sarah Kliff  Around 1 am on August 20, Ismael Saifan woke up with a terrible pain in his lower back, likely the result of moving furniture earlier that day. "It was a very sharp muscle pain," Saifan, a 39-year-old engineer, remembers. "I couldn't move or sleep in any position. I was trying laying down, sitting down, nothing worked." Saifan went online to figure out where he could see a do...

By: Marshall Allen This story was co-published with NPR's Shots blog. Two years ago, Margaret O'Neill brought her 5-year-old daughter to Children's Hospital Colorado because the band of tissue that connected her tongue to the floor of her mouth was too tight. The condition, literally called being "tongue-tied," made it hard for the girl to make "th" sounds. It's a common problem with a simple fix:...

Three months ago, Niall Brennan was appointed president and executive director of the Health Care Cost Institute, a not-for-profit organization based in Washington, D.C., that focuses on improving price transparency through the use of insurance data. He succeeds David Newman, a health policy expert who had led the organization since its founding in 2011. Brennan was the CMS first chief data office...

 By. Melanie Evans, Yaryna Serkez, and Merrill Sherman  More U.S. workers are taking a bigger out-of-pocket hit from their employer-provided health plans. Blame high deductibles. High-deductible plans required patients to spend $2,200 to $4,300, on average, in 2016 before insurance kicked in, and amounts can be significantly more. Employers have embraced high deductibles to cut the amoun...

By: Austin Frakt   The Medicare Advantage program was supposed to save taxpayers money by allowing insurers to offer older Americans private alternatives to Medicare. The plans now cover 19 million people, a third of all those who qualify for Medicare. Enrollee satisfaction is generally high, and studies show that plans offer higher quality than traditional Medicare. But the government p...

By: Laura Dyrda The Health Care Cost Institute issued the "Healthy Marketplace Index: Medical Service Category Price Index" report for 2017 in April. The report calculates metrics comparing aspects of price, competition and productivity of healthcare markets over time, which shows trends for potential future research. The report includes data for inpatient, outpatient and physician medical service...

By: Maria Castellucci  The best solutions to decrease the high costs of healthcare services may not be solved at the federal level but in states and their communities, a new study suggests. The report, published by researchers this week at the Health Care Cost Institute, found costs of services vary dramatically depending on a patient's zip code. For example, patients in El Paso, Texas, paid ...

By: Maggie Fox  Why does a knee replacement cost $29,000 in Kansas but $40,000 in next-door Colorado? Health care prices are all over the map in the U.S., a new study finds. It digs deeply into the crazy pattern of health costs across the U.S. and shows there is very little consistency. The report from the Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI) finds prices for the same procedures vary by som...

By: Helaine Olen  It's a new year, and you know what that means: Your health insurance deductible just reset. Which for many of us means looking forward to paying a significant amount out of pocket for health care until we've spent enough for our insurance payments to kick in. According to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2016, the average deductible for an American with employer-bas...

By: Dan Mangan Spending on health care for people who have private insurance accelerated last year, ending a two-year period of more modest spending growth, a new study finds. In 2015, overall spending for people with private health insurance increased by 4.6 percent, according to the Health Care Cost Institute report. Most of that increase, again, was due to higher prices for prescription drugs a...

By: Vera Gruessner  Healthcare spending within the private health insurance market has grown 4.6 percent in 2015, according to a press release from the Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI). This type of growth in spending is higher than in recent years. For instance, healthcare spending in 2014 saw a 2.6 percent rise while 2013 spending increased by 3 percent. The HCCI study, called the 2015 Hea...

 By: Carolyn Johnson While politicians have been embroiled in a fiery debate over President Obama's signature health-care law, a quiet but profound shift is fundamentally reshaping how health insurance works for the roughly 155 million Americans who receive coverage through their employers. A national survey of employer health benefits released Wednesday shows how much deductibles — the healt...