Anna Wilde Mathews

speaker

275 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2017 last heard Sep 2023

Anna Wilde Mathews’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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WSJ Your Money Briefing · Health-Insurance Costs to Rise 6.5% or More Next Year · 8 Sep 2023 podcast

It's a sort of delayed reaction to the inflation that we've been seeing all over the economy for a few years now.

Hospitals and other health care providers have seen their own costs going up over the last few years, particularly for nurses and other staffing.

Well, partly it's a sort of delayed reaction to the inflation that we've been seeing all over the economy for a few years now.

Hospitals and other health care providers have seen their own costs going up over the last few years, particularly for nurses and other staffing, and they want to pass that along to health insurers in the form of higher rates paid to the hospitals.

But their contracts with health insurers typically run over a few years, often three.

So they had to wait until those contracts came up for renegotiation to come in and say, hey, we need a big increase to cover our increased costs.

So it's a little bit of a domino effect that moved a little more slowly in this portion of the economy, but now really is kicking in.

Another big driver is the cost of drugs, which is something I think all consumers, all listeners are aware of at this point.

emergence of new specialty medications that can be very efficacious but often come with a really high price tag.

And one particularly important category there is the diabetes and weight loss drugs known as GLP-1s.

So that's Wigovi and Ozempic and Munjaro, which have shown to be very effective but are also in high demand and are not cheap.

There's a bit of that, but honestly, what I heard from experts is that the bigger drivers here are more the rising prices for healthcare, the inflationary pressures, and it's not driven so much by utilization, as they call it, although there is some of that, some rebound and

Maybe, unfortunately, some people discovering things that they didn't discover a few years ago when they were supposed to get that mammogram or colonoscopy.

So we're primarily talking about employers, employer-provided insurance, private insurance.

We're not talking about government programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

So that affects employers, and it also affects their workers, who often pay a portion of the premium or the premium equivalent out of their paychecks and also, of course, often face out-of-pocket charges such as deductibles.

It depends on the employer.

There's a huge variety as workers, as everybody knows, having probably seen different amounts come out of their paycheck depending on where they're working.

But what I heard is that although employers might increase the share of the premium that the employees pay by a little bit, in general, they're not making big changes there because there is still tightness in the labor market in a lot of sectors.

And a lot of employers are not wanting to do anything to their benefits package that would

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