We All Want Longer, Healthier Lives. But It's Going to Cost Us.
Arresting the growth of health care spending in the United States is impossible. The policies and programs we're suggesting will either accelerate the upward trend or slow it temporarily, but they won't stop it. Health care costs will go up year by year until you die, and probably until your children die, too.
This difficult truth, which has emerged over the past half-century, is leading the United States and the rest of the industrialized world into a new era of humankind.
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For most of recorded history, food production was the chief goal of human labor. In the United States, that time is long gone. We spend a little less than 10 percent of our income on food, down from 25 percent in 1930. We spend twice as much -- 21 percent -- on shelter. But health care -- that's where we really get our wallets out.
Last year, 16 percent of the nation's gross domestic product went for health care, about $7,600 per person. In terms of human effort, health care is the new food. By 2016, when it reaches 20 percent of GDP, it will be the new shelter. If it grows at its present rate through the first three-quarters of this century, it will consume 38 percent of GDP by 2075. It will then be the new food and shelter.
This isn't a mistake. If it were, we might have a chance of stopping it. It's success -- the way things are supposed to be, and the way we want them to be.
"At the end of the day, when it comes to controlling health care costs, the enemy is us," said Drew Altman, head of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. "Americans want the latest and best in health care technology, and we want it down the street, and we want it now."