No, it’s not that Conservative Republican Sen. Bennett got unseated by the Tea Party. Rather, it’s that the White House and Congress got a jolt this week from Utah (published in the Washington Post) about health care costs rising very fast in the nation’s most frugal Medicare spending state other than Hawaii. If there’s any state that is expected to have medical spending under control, it’s Utah. Its many non-smoking and non-drinking family-oriented citizens are considered the healthiest in the nation, and Intermountain Healthcare, often cited by Mr. Obama as an example of efficiency and value, is a trend-setter in restraining costs.

But unfortunately, several Medicare data observers including the D.C.-based Center for Studying Health System Change noted an alarming increase in Medicare costs in Utah this year and in the past several years. In fact, Medicare spending in the Provo region is rising 8.6 percent annually, nearly double the national rate of 4.7 percent, according to the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care.

Dartmouth and others have noted that other low-cost areas, Oxford, Miss., Wausau, Wis., Durham, N.C., Rochester, Minn. (of the Mayo Clinic), also have had significant upticks in costs as well. This is making everyone nervous here in Washington. The commercial insurers report that the prices in Utah still remain lower than the national average, but the increases are keeping some policy wonks here awake at night.

CareFirst, the big Blue Cross Blue Shield plan here in Washington DC, Maryland, and Virginia reports that they see costs and premiums rising by 100% over the next 5 years here! As a result, CareFirst has developed a scary new cost cutting strategy, proposing to return to using primary care as gatekeepers on specialty services, but paying primary care physicians up to $300,000 if they save money by referring patients to lower cost services. Yikes.

*** Image from Flickr (D Sharon Pruitt). ***

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