Harriet Torry

speaker

611 appearances 11 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2017 last heard Dec 2024

Harriet Torry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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WSJ Your Money Briefing · Americans Are Paying More Than They Used to for Healthcare · 30 Dec 2024 podcast

One thing that we have seen in that industry is consolidation.

We've also just seen a very steep increase in labour costs, much of it because of the healthcare pandemic.

Inflation for healthcare does tend to run above overall CPI inflation.

That's typical over many years.

And that is often due to wage costs because healthcare is a very labour-intensive industry.

When you think of the type of work that nurses and doctors do, it's hard to automate.

You need someone to give you an IV or patch you up, whatever it might be.

So there are a lot of people who work in health care.

Wages rose quickly in the pandemic because many people left the profession.

There was a lot of burnout, a lot of turnover.

And that is costly for employers.

And it just means that overall prices rise to cover those labor costs.

We've seen that there is a very large public debate right now, and the killing of a health insurance executive in New York City did really crack open this debate about healthcare costs, the costs of insurance, and people feel a lot of frustration.

But when we talk about healthcare costs, we have to be clear that we're talking about many different things.

That's part of the frustration.

There are so many different ways that you pay for healthcare, whether it's through premiums or deductibles or out-of-network expenses.

co-pays.

So when we talk about healthcare spending overall, there isn't one single way to measure that necessarily.

It's a very broad definition and lots of different people are paying lots of different things.

There are many different reasons.

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