Inflation is hitting your medical bills: Here’s how

The US Consumer Price Index (CPI) for medical care in June rose 0.2% from May and 3.3% from a year ago.

Yahoo Finance Reporter Anjalee Khemlani joins Wealth! to break down how inflation is impacting Americans' medical bills.

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Wealth!

This post was written by Nicholas Jacobino

Video Transcript

Inflation largely cooling in June.

But medical care prices are rising and that hurts our wallets to discuss what this means for your medical bills.

Let's bring in Yahoo Finance's very own Angelique Alani here with us.

Ok. What do we need to be wary of?

What do we need to be aware of as well in this process?

We have a bit of good news.

That's good.

Yeah, a little bit.

Let's break it down.

So of course, we know that health care costs always on the rise, right?

That's something that is the tail of the US health care system.

But what we have in recent years is a little bit of a decline on that, the pace of growth has slowed and that is in part due to the changes in how we are interacting with our health care system.

So we did see that decline through the pandemic and then by 2021 it started to pick up again, but a much slower rate than before.

We saw health care largely outpace other sectors for quite some time.

And now it is not one of the biggest growth.

So what we did see is for example, month over month, take a look at that is 2.2% growth, month over month compared to 0.5 in May.

And then you have 3.3% year over year growth compared to 3.1% in May.

So you can see that sort of slowing down.

Meanwhile, look at the different sectors, one of them is going to surprise you.

So we've got health hospital services at 0.1% physicians services at 0.1% and then prescriptions unchanged.

Now, I know that clashes with everything you know about the health care system and the conversation happening right now with FTC looking to really wheedle out and will down where the high prices of drug costs are coming from.

We know that the US pays more than other countries, but the the system and the industry has been slowing down those increases.

And so that's where this is coming from.

It's quite interesting even though we still pay some of those high prices.

And so what we also know is that on the jobs report side, I know we've talked about this before.

We see that climb in those numbers for the jobs and it really does like a bang up job every time that is coming to a head as well.

Because we know with the more, the more that they have to hire, the more that they have to adjust salaries and increase offerings, we're starting to see that also come to a head and we'll see those increases filter through to our wallet.

So largely speaking, health care will still be a problem as always, but maybe not as quite high a pace as we have been used to in past years.

Really good breakdown on the correlation there.

Yahoo Finance Zone Angelique.

Thanks.