Only One Thing Certain about Healthcare Costs: They Grow Faster Than Everything Else

Here is a very interesting picture from the Atlantic website, charting the unpredictability of healthcare costs.

The picture was put into the article in large part to point out how hard it is to estimate how much healthcare costs will grow over time. And certainly, the up-and-down roller coaster like quality of this picture is strong evidence that anyone who thinks they know what healthcare will cost the future should now, is probably lying.

But something else is worth noticing from this picture: even though the rate of healthcare inflation rises and falls, the rate almost always comes out as being greater than the more general rate of inflation. Healthcare costs rise faster than other costs. That means, all else equal, healthcare will continue to take up a larger and larger portion of our financial resources. That is unsustainable.
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PeterUbel