Arnold Kling blogs on Aging vs Health Care

The always-interesting Arnold Kling at EconLog has a short post drawing attention to my recent AEI paper comparing how population aging and health care cost inflation will contribute to the long-term fiscal gap. (Hint: aging plays a much bigger role than many say.)

Here's Arnold's thoughts:

From my perspective, the health care cost issue is a bit of a red herring. If you had government out of the health care financing business, you would not worry about what health care costs are doing. If my fellow citizens choose to spend more of their money on their health care, that's not my concern. It's the prospect of my fellow citizens spending more of my money on their health care that has me worried.

A good point. There are good reasons to spend more on health care – rising incomes make health care more attractive than other good, and new technologies make new treatments available – but there are also a lot of reasons we shouldn't be spending so much. While I'm not a health care expert, I do believe that if customers saw more of the bill they were paying there would be greater pressure for efficiency in the health care sector.