If Rising Health Care Costs Cannot Continue

They Will Not Continue

Austin Frakt who writes excellent health economic on The Incidental Economist Blog has this graph in his discussion of rising health care costs.

The truly sad thing is that while everyone knows this is the case, there is no actual national policy designed to change this.  Instead the discussion is about “cost shifting”, which is taking the current group distribution of the cost of health care and shifting it to other groups.  This is essentially what the Paul Ryan Plan to end Medicare does, and it is what every other so-called “cost control” policy proposes.  Not cost control in the sense of lowering costs, cost control in the sense of shifting costs away from government and to, well, to taxpayers, consumers, poor people, old people, disabled people and anyone else to whom costs can be shifted.

There is nothing that portends that this chart will not continue the same trend. 

And for those supporters of the Ryan Plan which relies on competition in the private insurance market to control costs the eternal question remains.

If private insurance can control costs, why hasn't it done so?