Medical Robbery


It's been quite a while since I've posted anything here, travel and other writing keeping me busy elsewhere. Also, there is nothing to report in my battle over my son's emergency room billing. The providers have been eerily quiet; I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, perhaps with a mean-sounding demand from a collection agency. Or maybe they're already busy trying to notch down my credit score. For indeed protesting against the cost of a healthcare service can end up in higher costs in other areas such as getting a loan.

Today I wanted to touch on the future, distant to me but perhaps not to younger readers. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is a non-partisan research arm of Congress whose job is, among other things, to provide forecasts of government spending assuming no changes in current law. A study released by them earlier this year forecast the future role of healthcare in total government spending. As a basis, they report that for the period 1974-2013 healthcare was on average about 25% of all other government spending besides Social Security. However, under current law by 2038 healthcare will be 113% of all other government spending beyond Social Security. That is, healthcare will cost more than national defense, infrastructure, justice, diplomacy, and every other activity of government combined! This vast and impossible increase is due to a combination of factors such as the aging of the population, but fully 40% of the total increase can be blamed on the rising costs for services.

So rising medical costs not only threaten our individual budgets but that of the nation as a whole.  We can venture to say that these rising costs can come to threat even our own national security. Therefore we know that healthcare is never going to get to a point that it will swallow more spending that the rest of government combined. The only question is whether the current generation with the reins of power will do something about the problem. If it doesn't the generation that follows will have no choice but to address it, albeit at a much larger cost to the nation. The first option is one of the motivators for writing this blog.