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00:00The question is is there's the benefit the cost benefit analysis that happens here. Right. Cost so much to actually treat these things when they do affect people and they end up being hospitalized and long term care facilities. How do we start to treat them earlier so it doesn't end up costing as much and so people are healthier. Well that is the key. So I mean I just want to address before I get to that is one I just mentioned that that healthcare is expected to increase next year and inflation is at a 40 year high. So I do expect you know it to drive up medical costs over the next year. But there is a lot that can be done to reduce the costs and to to treat people earlier. So I mean class can do a lot. Mean what you can do is really promote using lower cost settings. You can do things like promote use of walking clinics and urgent care centers for non life threatening acute care needs. Anytime a patient is using a hospital facility for care they generally pay more for services. So there is you know there's very many times and maybe the only and best option but there's capabilities and access for alternative care centers and they have grown tremendously in the past decade. And I think with with with the pandemic there has been a lot more promotion. You know there's been a lot more access to just care outside of the hospitals or the outpatient care in general has just been tremendous. And those poorer I say these poor urgent care centers you know who you know over the last year I've just been flooded with patients for Covid ISE. I mean we certainly have to figure something out so they're not bursting at the seams. Hey Eileen you mentioned that inflation is take is causing the price of health care to go up. We're gonna see open enrollment I think for a lot of companies in the near future. Are we going to see sticker shock as employees at many of these companies when we start to see how much more our premiums are going to go up. It really depends on the plan sponsor. I mean I think plants. Plants should expect on average and we've seen this in our healthcare. Questions are resold. The survey basically is showing that medical planning costs are expected to increase at an annual rate of 7 to 8 percent in 2023. Now let you know we've seen the trends were actually good. They had gone down significantly because people when were deferring care. And now we're seeing between the inflationary environment people actually using services and now there's been an uptick in services. I think that we're seeing that they're going up a lot. That said it's not at the same level as what we're seeing for inflation. Inflation think medical care is price. Price inflation has actually gone up just in general for overall overall consumer goods. And medical price is probably a little bit behind and it's fine because of timing of provider contracting and commercial plans. So I think it's embedded in those rates to some extent but it's probably going to increase over the next couple of years. You know I wonder what that. The right conversation is to be having at this point health care and the costs to society to individuals to companies just to the economy. We've been talking about this for years. Eileen and I do wonder you know you guys are looking at how inflation is impacting health care costs. I mean should we be looking at something like and I talked about NCD at the top. I mean NCD which touched so many of our lives either directly or through people we know. Is there something that we can think about in terms of lifestyle preventive care. So maybe the question to be asked is you know how can preventive care impact health care cost. Is there smarter conversation. We were able to turn things upside down in how we approach health care where we would get a better outcome in terms of quality of life as well as when it comes to the cost equation. I mean definitely and prevent that. There is definitely opportunity would preventive care. I think we've seen even with the pandemic that there were a lot of people who didn't like to take their preventive care screenings. And and there are people that are now getting diagnosed with late stage cancer. Some preventive care just is always a smart thing to do in general. And you know there's any opportunity you can have you have to do to get to care sooner is always going to catch things earlier and avoid you know high costs claim outcomes. That's such a smart thing to do.

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Health Care Costs on the Rise

Eileen Flick, director of health technical services at Segal, joins Bloomberg Businessweek to discuss inflation's impact on a variety of critical health-related goods and services. (This interview aired Sept. 27, 2022.) (Source: Bloomberg)

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