At the turn of the millennium, health-spending growth was spiraling out of control. Economists projected that the already ginormous health care sector would soon gobble up monster portions of the federal budget and the entire economy. But something strange happened over the past decade and a half.
That's true whether we're talking about public- or private-sector health spending; for Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance and out-of-pocket spending, annual outlays have been way lower than the doomsday forecasters anticipated. Curiously, too, the sharpest slowdown has occurred with Medicare.
In fact, about three-quarters of the health-spending slowdown nationwide was due to slow-as-an-(almost)-trickle growth in spending on the elderly.