First Consumer Price Index decline for medical care services in nearly 40 years

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is best known for our monthly job and inflation reports. We also publish data on many other topics, ranging from how Americans spend their time and money to workplace injuries and the growth of entrepreneurship. My new blog series, “Why This Counts,” will explain why we conduct our surveys and how people can use the data at work and home. I hope this series will take the mystery out of our data and make our work come to life for both new and advanced users.

In the March 24 Consumer Price Index release, one interesting item caught my eye. The seasonally adjusted index for medical care services declined 0.2 percent in February 2015, its first decline since November 1975. That’s a long time ago

— I was still in college then! Historically, the medical care services index has tended to increase more sharply than the overall price level.

This seems like the perfect time to define “medical care services” in more detail and explain why we measure this index.

First, the basics. The Consumer Price Index measures the average change over time in prices paid by consumers for a market basket of goods and services. The CPI affects nearly all Americans because of the many ways it is used, from making changes in the federal income tax structure to cost-of-living wage adjustments for millions of American workers.

One important part of the CPI market basket (that is, the set of goods and services that we price for the CPI) is medical care. Reflecting actual spending patterns, medical care now accounts for about 8 percent of the market basket for the CPI for all urban consumers. We call this share of the market basket its “relative importance,” and we use these shares to weight price changes as we calculate the average price change. Medical care in the CPI is broken down into medical care commodities (mostly prescription and non-prescription drugs) and medical care services.

Medical care services is the larger of the two components, representing over three-fourths of the medical care weight and about 6 percent of the entire CPI market basket.

Exactly what does the CPI price in medical care services? The largest components are hospital services and physicians’ services. Also included are dental services, services by other medical professionals, eyeglasses and eye care, and nursing homes.

In other words, the medical care services index in the CPI reflects the cost to consumers not only of trips to the doctor’s office or to the hospital, but also of trips to the dentist, psychologist or chiropractor, or even buying a new pair of glasses or staying in a nursing home.

Not surprisingly, medical care has a long history in the CPI, although of course the composition of the index has changed over time. In the 1930s, when medical care represented only about half the weight it does now, the medical care part of the CPI included specific entries like castor oil, tonsillectomies and, quaintly, “house visits” by doctors.

Like other CPI price data, prices for medical care services are collected monthly in a sample of metropolitan areasacross the country. Of course, collecting medical care prices isn’t as simple a matter as collecting prices for some other goods in the CPI, such as bananas or gasoline.

Collecting these medical care prices allows us to accurately track medical care spending patterns.

What should we make of this month’s decline in the medical care services index? My staff often say that “one month does not make a trend.” Nevertheless, even with the recent slowdown in the pace of medical care services inflation, this number is clearly unusual. So, we need to keep watching over the coming months to see if this is the start of a new trend or a one-time occurrence.

Erica Groshen is the commissioner of the department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.