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This is an important piece of information that might have been worth including in a NYT article on premium increase requests by insurers in the state health exchanges. The Commerce Department reports that spending on personal health care services, which accounts for the overwhelming majority of health care spending, increased by 5.4 percent from the second quarter of 2014 to the second quarter of 2015. (The major item missing is prescription drugs, which did have a faster rate of increase.) This means that unless the insurers are facing a very skewed sample or they badly misunderstood the market, they should not need large premium increases to cover their costs.