Bend a resilient object and it will spring back with a vengeance once released from your grip. Is that what is about to happen to healthcare spending?
For years now, experts have been debating ways to “bend the cost curve ” – take the sharp rise in healthcare costs, picture a rapidly ascending line on a XY axis, and slow it down, bend it so it moves horizontally to the X axis.
In the last few years, we seem to have bent the curve as we’ve hoped to. Healthcare spending is growing more slowly than it has in decades. The federal government recently reported that: “The Congressional Budget Office now estimates that Federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid in 2020 will be $188 billion below what it projected as recently as August 2010.”
But this good economic news may soon come to an end, and the pent-up energy of the healthcare economy could snap back and break our budgets if we are not vigilant. (To read the rest of this article and leave comments, please visit Forbes.)
