Hospital prices always go up. But this year, they went down

New federal data shows that the price of hospital care in the United States fell between this January and a year prior — the first time the government has seen a year-over-year drop since it started keeping track in 1998. The price of hospital care fell 0.1 percent between January 2014 and January 2015, Modern Healthcare reported Thursday morning. When you focus on Medicare prices, the decline gets steeper: prices there fell 2.9 percent over the same time period. Medical prices getting smaller rather than larger is a big deal. Health wonks typically get excited by something more modest: when health-care prices rise more slowly than they used to