Private-payer healthcare services price growth hit a new record high, with prices for nursing home care increasing at the fastest rate among healthcare categories, at 7%. That’s according to Altarum’s monthly Health Sector Economic Indicators brief, released Friday.
“While the data don’t provide enough information to look at price growth by payer type specifically for nursing home care, across all health care services private insurance payer prices grew much faster than Medicare prices last month. Part of this increase may be attributable to new private insurance contracts with providers in 2023 that increased reimbursement rates across health care services,” Corwin (Corey) Rhyan, MPP, research director of Health Economics and Policy at Altarum, told the McKnight’s Business Daily.
Overall, the numbers show that national health spending is holding at 17.2% of the gross domestic product, where it has been hovering since August 2022.
“Neglecting government subsidies, spending on nursing home care (10.6%) and prescription drugs (9.5%) grew fastest in February, while physician and clinical services spending increased the least (4.3%),” the experts said.
Healthcare use in February was up 3.9% year over year across all healthcare services. Home care use increased by 5.1% last month, according to the brief.
In general, private-sector employment added 145,000 jobs in March, and annual pay growth decelerated to 6.9% year over year. Healthcare job growth is trending modestly up across all major settings of care. Nursing and residential care facilities added 8,000 jobs, compared with the 15,000 additional jobs seen in ambulatory settings and 10,900 in hospitals.
Wage growth in healthcare continues to decline and now sits slightly below economywide wage growth. February data show that healthcare wages grew by 4.3% year over year, while total private sector wages grew by 4.6%. Nursing and residential care saw wage growth 4.7%, as did hospitals; ambulatory care wages grew by 3.8%.
