Health-care spending curbed by recession

The total amount that Americans spent on health care grew less than 4 percent per year in 2009 and 2010, the slowest annual pace in more than five decades, said the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services this week. Job loss, tighter household budgets, and economic fears fueled most of the drop, according to health experts, but the push for accountability by hospitals and health-care providers appeared to reinforce the trend. “The tectonic plates might be beginning to shift,” said Karen Davis of the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit research group. “It’s hard to believe everything that’s been tried over the last decade to slow spending wouldn’t be making a difference.”

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