Are Health Costs Really Slowing? And What Does it Mean If They Are?

Mar 19, 2013

[This post is based on Chapter 5 of the Council of Economic Advisers new Economic Report of the President.]

The fact shown in the first chart below—a decline in the rate of health spending per person—is becoming pretty widely known.  What’s not known is whether this trend will stick.  As I suggest below, based on the new ERP chapter, I think at least some of it will, and if it does, it signals one of the more important economic developments of our time, with far reaching implications for fiscal policy (and for jobs and growth too, but I’ll speak to that in a different post).