Basically utilization doesn’t drive cost increases. Branding is and provider market leverage.
That intuitively makes sense when you think about something like prostrate cancers and the all the ads for proton treatment at named place xyz. Regular therapy is expensive at $18k average. Proton runs $38k average.
Care to guess were the demand is?
Diabetes is expensive too, average $80k lifetime charges for someone in their 50s when diagnosed. Add in the percentage of population with diabetes from ’97 to 2013 went from 2.5% to 7.5% and we have a formula for disaster.