Health Affairs

Health Affairs, 22, no. 2 (2003): 230-237 doi: 10.1377/hlthaff.22.2.230 © 2003 by Project HOPE	New Online   Getting Health Reform Done   After the State of the Union   Incremental Reform   E-Health in Developing World   Most-Read Articles in 2009

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Comparing Medicare And Private Insurers: Growth Rates In Spending Over Three Decades

Cristina Boccuti and Marilyn Moon

Over the past three decades both Medicare and private insurers have initiated cost containment mechanisms to control the growth of spending on personal health care. To compare spending growth between these two payers, we present four measurement principles that should be implemented when drawing such comparisons, and we apply them to the National Health Accounts data files. We attribute Medicare’s ability to equal—and using our measures, actually exceed—the private sector in controlling the rate of health spending growth to Medicare’s ability to price aggressively for the services it covers.

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