Consumer health insurance costs are up more than 20% year over year, according to the Labor Department’s Consumer Price Index data released Wednesday. Medical care costs overall have risen 4.2% from a year ago.
“If you actually pay out of pocket with a deductible or pay for insurance, then you are experiencing a problem with healthcare inflation that the CPI is capturing,” Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer at the Bleakley Advisory Group wrote to clients Wednesday.
Health care insurance alone has added more than 0.3 percentage points to the core inflation rate in the last year, says Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, while noting that the index “measures the administrative costs and profits of insurers, not premiums.”
