Is the health-cost slowdown over?

Health-care spending might not be growing so quickly after all.

Earlier this year, the Bureau of Economic Analysis projected that health-care spending would massively increase in the first quarter of 2014. In the health wonk world, that inspired a lot of panic about the return of high health-care cost growth. Not only would that make health care more expensive for everyone, but it would further strain budgets at all levels of government.

The median salary for anesthesiologists who started jobs last year was $300,000 — about twice as much as the pediatrician who just started off.

The new survey of doctors’ median first-year pay after residency, published Wednesday by the Medical Group Management Association, shows huge variation in what doctors earn during their first year in practice. Speciality doctors’ salaries vastly outpace primary care physicians, with surgeons and anesthesiologists coming out on top.

Hospitals are meant to save lives — but they can often be deadly places to spend time.

From the infections patients get when they stay in the hospital (which kill about 75,000 people annually) to medical mistakes (surgeons left an impressive 4,857 items in patients over the last two decades), hospitals are places where lots can go wrong.

The federal government thinks it will spend $900 billion less on health care programs over the next decade than it projected just three years ago, according to a new analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Most of that isn’t due to the federal government cutting programs or reducing what it pays doctors. Its largely due to the fact that health care costs have grown a lot slower in the past four years than they did in the past.

A slew of new reports suggest that health care costs are growing faster – and the White House says that’s actually good news.

To them, more medical spending is proof that Obamacare is working: more people are getting health insurance, so they’re using more medical care.

A four-year slowdown in health spending growth could be coming to an end.

Americans’ spending on health care spiked by 9.9 percent in the first quarter of 2014, new federal data shows. That data could be revised, or it could be a blip, but it adds to the evidence that health-care costs are back on the march — which is very, very bad news for the federal budget.