HEALTH AFFAIRS BLOG:

"Perhaps nothing illustrates the intractability of America's struggle with health spending more than the recent announcement by Amazon, JP Morgan, and Berkshire Hathaway that they were founding a new entity to address health care costs for their employees. Despite lacking any concrete details this announcement managed to wipe billions of dollars in market capitalization from established health care stocks and dominate the media cycle for several days. Concerns about health spending are not new, interventions are many and varied, and yet the one constant seems to be that spending on health care goes up every year.

In this post, we present recent trends in health spending and utilization based on our annual Health Care Cost and Utilization Report. Our analysis relies on claims data for individuals with employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) that the Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI) receives from four national health insurers..."