The company, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, said the increase was needed because of rising provider fees, greater use of medical services by its members, and "the fact that healthier people are dropping coverage during a bad economy," Johnny Wong, a company spokesman, said in an e-mail.
But Wall Street is worried about Medicare pressures and rising provider costs.
Future research is needed to understand and measure varied new activities occurring in the health plans and hospital markets that contribute to the high and rising provider prices in the last decade.
cannot meet quality measures and costs rise, the providers in the organization may well receive lower payments.
Although the survey did not ask teenagers why they preferred text messaging, other research has linked its rise to providers' sale of cheap packages of several hundred messages.
Amy Bartlett, global co-ordinator for Open Forum for CSO Development, which works to build a consensus for effective aid distribution, hopes that the rise of providers from outside North America and Europe will plug some of the donor gaps left over from 2008's global financial crisis.
Demand for specialised semiconductors is rising from providers of cloud-computing services to lower the energy consumption of their data centres; buying Altera, which makes programmable chips, will help Intel to supply these components.
Sports rights and drama production costs have risen, as providers' ability to bring in large audiences and create so-called "event television" such as Kevin Spacey in Netflix's House of Cards has become a valuable commodity.
Andrea Sutcliffe, the CQC's chief inspector of adult social care, was responding to the leak to the BBC of a recent internal briefing document that spells out how rises in providers' costs and the squeeze on local councils' budgets are leaving care services in an unsustainable position.
As a result, the cost of healthcare continues rising, as providers and insurance companies try to find ways to care for this aging population.
