Aug 11 2011
Findings show medical spending is very different when comparing private insurance data with Medicare spending rates.
Kaiser Health News: Capsules: High Medical Spending Found In Unexpected Places, Says Study
Quick: Where do insured Americans spend the most on health care? Miami? Los Angeles? Nope. It's Anderson, Ind., where people with employer-provided insurance spent an average of $7,231 on medical treatments. That's according to an analysis of 382 metropolitan areas examined by Thomson Reuters, a consulting firm that has one of the biggest databases of insurance claims from employers (Rau, 8/9).
Politico Pro: Study Urges Look At Private Insurance Data
The Texas border town of McAllen is famous in the health policy world for its enormous Medicare outlays, but a new report finds the area's privately insured medical spending is among the lowest in the country. The [health care] business of Thompson Reuters released a white paper Wednesday morning urging policymakers to consider private insurance data and base any reform decisions on a more comprehensive picture of regional medical spending, not reflected in the Medicare data alone. "High-spending areas, identified by the Medicare fee-for-service spending, are not necessarily high-spending areas for the commercially insured adult population or child population," said William D. Marder, the lead author of the report and senior vice president for analytic, consulting and research services at Thomson Reuters. "The world's more complicated than that" (Norman, 8/10).
 This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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Medicare Advantage insurers face new curbs on overcharges in Trump plan that reins in payments