Addressing Rising Health Care Costs — A View from the Congressional Budget Office

Interview with Peter Orszag on the rising cost of health care. (07:58)Download The long-term fiscal balance of the United States will be determined primarily by the future rate of growth of health care costs, as we have recently noted.1 If costs per enrollee in Medicare and Medicaid continued to grow at the same rate as they have over the past four decades, federal spending on those two programs alone would increase from about 5% of the gross domestic product today to about 20% by 2050 — roughly the share of the economy now accounted for by the entire federal budget. Compounding the challenge for policymakers is the difficulty of controlling federal spending . . .