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Experimental disease-based price indexes now available
From the same fine folks who bring you the monthly jobs report:
Experimental disease-based price indexes now available
July 30, 2015 BLS Commissioner
I am extremely pleased to announce that BLS has released a new data product, experimental disease-based price indexes.
These indexes will give data users better ongoing information about the evolution of the nation’s healthcare system. Because healthcare is such a large part of our economy, it is incredibly important we produce timely, accurate, and reliable medical statistics.
Currently, all federal statistical agencies report healthcare data by what’s called the “medical goods and services categories.” However, this approach doesn’t tell us one important thing: Which diseases have the greatest effect on healthcare spending over time?
After identifying the diseases that affect spending the most, we can drill down to learn the reasons for their growth. With disease-based price indexes, we can break down the growth into categories, such as the parts that come from inflation, population growth, growth in disease prevalence, and real per capita output growth. We can’t do any of this with our traditional medical goods and services categories, such as physician services, pharmaceuticals, and hospitals.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis now reports spending by disease in their national healthcare satellite accounts, so we also need disease-based price indexes to adjust for inflation. Disease-based price indexes measure healthcare inflation differently and capture the effects of innovations that our traditional medical goods and services price indexes do not. For example, better surgical procedures have enabled doctors to perform many types of surgery using a less expensive outpatient setting, instead of an expensive inpatient hospital. The disease-based price indexes allow us to measure the effect of this shift.
I am extremely pleased to announce that BLS has released a new data product, experimental disease-based price indexes.
These indexes will give data users better ongoing information about the evolution of the nation’s healthcare system. Because healthcare is such a large part of our economy, it is incredibly important we produce timely, accurate, and reliable medical statistics.
Currently, all federal statistical agencies report healthcare data by what’s called the “medical goods and services categories.” However, this approach doesn’t tell us one important thing: Which diseases have the greatest effect on healthcare spending over time?
After identifying the diseases that affect spending the most, we can drill down to learn the reasons for their growth. With disease-based price indexes, we can break down the growth into categories, such as the parts that come from inflation, population growth, growth in disease prevalence, and real per capita output growth. We can’t do any of this with our traditional medical goods and services categories, such as physician services, pharmaceuticals, and hospitals.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis now reports spending by disease in their national healthcare satellite accounts, so we also need disease-based price indexes to adjust for inflation. Disease-based price indexes measure healthcare inflation differently and capture the effects of innovations that our traditional medical goods and services price indexes do not. For example, better surgical procedures have enabled doctors to perform many types of surgery using a less expensive outpatient setting, instead of an expensive inpatient hospital. The disease-based price indexes allow us to measure the effect of this shift.
