Policy Approaches to Reduce What Commercial Health Insurers Pay for Hospitals’ and Physicians’ Services
Presentation
Presentation by Michael Cohen, Daria Pelech, and Karen Stockley, analysts in CBO’s Health Analysis Division, to the Dartmouth Symposium on Health Care Delivery Science.
The prices that commercial health insurers in the United States pay for hospitals’ and physicians’ services are much higher, on average, and have been rising more quickly than the prices paid by public health insurance programs. Those rising prices—rather than growth in the per-person use of health care services—are an important driver of recent increases in premiums for commercial health plans. Higher premiums in turn increase the amount that individuals and employers pay for health insurance coverage and increase total federal subsidies for commercial health insurance. In a report released in September 2022, the Congressional Budget Office described policy approaches available to the Congress that would reduce the prices that commercial insurers pay providers and thereby reduce premiums for that coverage.
