Thursday, April 02, 2009

Growing Old   [Ramesh Ponnuru]

As Andrew Biggs notes, the conventional wisdom among liberals who talk or write about entitlements is that we have a health-care-cost crisis, not an entitlement crisis. On this view it's health-care inflation, not the aging of the population, that drives our grim budget projections. The resulting, convenient conclusion is that we need liberal health-care reform rather than conservative entitlement reform. Biggs points out that this conclusion is not particularly reality-based:

Congressional Budget Office projections show that population aging — not excess health-care cost growth — will be the biggest driver of overall entitlement costs until nearly mid-century. Over the next 20 years America will add eight seniors for each working-aged individual. This accounts for fully 60 percent of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid cost growth through 2029, and it is not until 2045 that health-care inflation will become the principal driver of entitlement costs.

He also rightly observes that liberalism's preferred health-care policies do not inevitably follow from the imperative of bringing health costs down.

04/02 06:05 PMShare