Interesting albeit sobering study on Health Care Costs

[youbet]

Perhaps a tad off topic but I thought that Medicare could never exceed SS. Or is it just Medicare increases will never exceed the annual Cola of SS?

You can refer to the SS web site for details, but, yes, your Part B Medicare premium can exceed your SS payment. For example, if your Part B premium is $106 and your monthly SS is $56, they take all of your SS and send you a bill for $50 every month. Speaking from personal experience here....

We're thankful to have access to Medicare but it's far more expensive for us than the subsidized HI we had during our working years and while our employers were providing subsidized retiree HI (pre 65). Fortunately, we did our homework and understood this before pulling the switch at 55 and 58 yo so it wasn't an unplanned surprise.

 

[tennisno1]

Consumer Reports Magazine this month has an excellent article on a big driver of medical costs.
Which is the cost of medications.
It turns out even old medicines are being jacked up in price by the pharma companies, (example Valent) which is legal and the increases are huge to the point where retired people cannot afford it.

While there are always bad actors in every industry- Valent is a good example of a bad actor. Also, agree overall drug costs are increasing but the latest available Medicare data shows drug spend is 9.8% of overall health care spend. The over whelming percentage of annual health care spend is hospitals and physician care.

Percent of national health expenditures for prescription drugs: 9.8% (2014)

For those who like deeper dives- references attached.

FastStats - Health Expenditures
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus15.pdf#094

Table 94 (page 2 of 2). National health expenditures, average annual percent change, and percent distribution,
by type of expenditure: United States, selected years 1960–2014
[Data are compiled from various sources by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services]

 

[travelover]

Medicare is not allowed to negotiate drug prices with the pharma companies. Unlike other countries where the gov't buys huge amounts of drugs and does negotiate with those exact same pharma companies.
It's one sided free enterprise and does not lead to lower drug costs, in fact encourages higher drug costs.

Well sure, but you don't think pharma would stoop to price gouging just because they can, do you?