'It’s All About Health Care'

No matter how many times this point is made, it seems to get lost in budget discussions. Our budget problem is about health care costs, and it's a problem the private sector shares (so privatizing health care doesn't solve the problem unless you believe, contrary to the evidence, that this would reduce cost growth):

The single best graph on what’s driving our deficits, by Ezra Klein: From the Congressional Budget Office’s hot new white paper, “Options for Deficit Reduction“:

That’s all of the federal government’s spending in three graphs. The top graph is health care, including Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. The middle graph is Social Security. And then there’s literally everything else: Defense, education, infrastructure, food safety, R&D, farm subsidies, the FBI, etc.

What these three charts tell you is simple: It’s all about health care. Spending on Social Security is expected to rise, but not particularly quickly. Spending on everything else is actually falling. It’s health care that contains most all of our future deficit problems. And the situation is even worse than it looks on this graph: Private health spending is racing upwards even faster than public health spending ...