September 11, 2014
Nope, I’m not kidding. We’ve seen a sharp slowdown in health care costs across the board over the last seven years. This has led the Congressional Budget Office to lower its deficit projections. In fact, the reductions in projected deficits due to this slowdown has been sharper than the reductions that we might have seen as a result of almost any politically plausible cut in benefits. But Robert Samuelson is not happy. He tells readers:
“No one truly grasps why Medicare spending has slowed so abruptly. A detailed CBO study threw cold water on many plausible explanations. What we don’t understand could easily reverse.”
In other words, just because the problem seems to be going away doesn’t mean we still shouldn’t make cuts to benefits. One factor that may lead us to believe that lower cost growth can be maintained is that the United States still pays more than twice as much per person for its care with nothing to show for it in terms of outcomes. In fact, if our costs were the same as those in any other wealthy country we would be looking at huge budget surpluses, not deficits.
The difference in costs is attributable to the fact that our doctors, drug companies, and other providers get paid twice as much as their counterparts in other wealthy countries. Of course these are all very powerful lobbies so we more often hear about proposals to cut benefits for seniors rather than reduce the money being paid to providers.
As noted before, since Social Security payments come from a designated tax, there is no real way to get money for the rest of Samuelson’s agenda unless we tax people for Social Security and then use the money for the military or other purposes. Such a scheme is not likely to be very popular and few politicians are willing to openly advocate it.
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