Three key factors drive up health care costs. There's how much each unit of health care cost. There's population growth: the total number of people who need health care can increase. And there's utilization: The amount of health care each person uses can increase.   In 2010, the cost of health care grew at about the same rate that it has for the past decade. So did the growth of the population. What's driving our slowdown in health care costs is a drop in utilization: Americans are using pretty much the same amount of health care as they did last year. That's a big change from the past decade, where we increasingly used more and more health care.
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