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January 11, 2018 at 02:14 PM
Paul Krugman tweeted the following about health care last week:
Paul Krugman @paulkrugman Why this is important: claims of an entitlements crisis rest largely on the assumption of rapid growth in health sp… https://t.co/wDCzBz7uYI Twitter: Paul Krugman on Twitter
The point is significant. For decades, public and private health care spending have grown significantly faster than the economy as a whole, a phenomenon known as excess-cost growth. Krugman’s tweet and a chart he attached from the Kaiser Family Foundation both suggest that excess-cost growth has ended. If this is the case, then fear of a looming Medicare crisis is overblown, and Republican enthusiasm for cuts in Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare is misplaced on two counts.
First, there’s no reason to panic even if entitlement spending contributes to federal deficit growth; concerns about the deficit are not only exaggerated, but at least in the short term, actively harmful. Chronic slow economic growth implies that the U.S. needs bigger deficits, not smaller ones.
Second, the biggest long-term driver of economic costs, health care spending, has been subdued recently and so there is no looming crisis to avoid.
The Congressional Budget Office, unsurprisingly, is less sanguine. Its charts show exploding government spending driven primarily by health care costs all the way to 2047. The CBO doesn’t agree with Krugman’s assertion that excess-cost growth is under control even in an aging population.
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Yet the CBO is often way too conservative in the way it uses economic data. It wouldn’t be shocking if its analysts were reluctant to incorporate good news on health costs into their forecast models until they had well over a decade’s worth of evidence to back up those conclusions. In many ways, this level of caution is a benefit. It means that the scare stories we hear are always a little bit scarier than reality. At the same time, however, if scare stories lead to unnecessary benefit cuts, people could be exposed to hardship for no good reason.
This discrepancy sent me digging. The issue is complex, but from what I can find I am reluctantly siding with the CBO. The underlying projections on health care costs come from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which condenses them into a 32-page methodological summary. Most of it concerns how to determine total spending on private health care. The relevant bits for our investigation are in these excerpts:
