Must-Read: Kevin Drum: The Future of Health Care Costs Looks Surprisingly Rosy
Must-Read: Two points: (1) Kevin Drum reveals that he writes his weblog posts not in his bathrobe but in his shorts. (2) Ever since the closing of the health-care expansion frontier opened by Medicare and Medicaid plus the industrialization of the hospital, we have seen a steady if saw-toothed decline in the pace of spending growth–your standard logistic in the share of spending devoted to health care.
The big question for me is: Are we near the asymptote? Or will there be another wave of backlash against narrow networks and bureaucratic blockages of authorizations?
Time will tell!
: The Future of Health Care Costs Looks Surprisingly Rosy: “You’ve seen various versions of this chart from me…
…perhaps you’d like to see it from a pair of highly-qualified researchers rather than some shorts-clad blogger? Not a problem…. The recent slowdown in health care costs isn’t just an artifact of the Great Recession. That probably helped, but the downward trend far predates the recession. Bottom line: there will still be spikes and valleys in the future, but there’s every reason to think that the general trend of health care costs over the next few decades will be either zero (i.e., equal to overall inflation) or pretty close to it.