Jonquilyn Hill

's number one go-to for health care reporting.

I am Julie Rovner.

I'm chief Washington correspondent for KFF Health News, and I'm host of What the Health, brought to you by KFF Health News and WAMU 88.5 FM.

Julie has covered the health care system for nearly 40 years, and she says that while the costs always go up...

This time is different.

Well, we are talking premiums going up pretty much across the board for every kind of health insurance right now.

You know, we've had bigger inflationary spikes, particularly in the early 2000s.

But for the last 15 years or so, health care costs have been rising, but not terribly fast.

They seem to be accelerating again now.

Why now?

Well, there's a bunch of reasons, but they come down to sort of two things, price and utilization.

Utilization is how many health care services people use.

And obviously the more services people use, the more the nation's health care bill goes up.

So there's a lot of things that are driving expanded use right now.

One of them is aging the baby boomers.

I am one of them.

As we get older, we suddenly get and need more health care.

And to some extent, we're still catching up from health care that people didn't get during the pandemic when nobody was leaving their houses and when you basically didn't go to the doctor unless you absolutely had to.

So we're still seeing people not only getting care that they didn't get then, but people who didn't get care then and should have, who are sicker than they might have been if they'd gotten preventive care or care early in the pandemic.

So that's sort of driving up use.