There’s been a lot of debate lately over whether health reform will lead to significant savings over the next 10 years. Clearly, when you’re adding tens of millions of people to the health care system, even if you bring costs down it’s going to take quite a while to overcome the expense of insuring all those new people. But even if it doesn’t save money over the next 10 years, we need to look at health care savings over a much longer period.
I post this graph at least once a month, it seems, because it shows just how important it is to reel in health care spending over the decades to come. Even if health reform will add to costs over the next decade as a result of dramatically expanding coverage, what about the potential for savings after that? If we can simultaneously improve health care for tens of millions of Americans and make a dent in the exponential rise of health care costs, that would be a major victory.
We need a much longer timeline, but unfortunately neither the Congressional Budget Office nor Congress itself think that way. It’s hard, as an elected politician, to think 50 years into the future, but that’s what we need to do with health care reform. The results 10 years from now are important, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg. We need a plan that can save us money for decades after that if we’re going to avoid a major fiscal crisis.
I agree — a longer time line would allow CBO to give a more accurate score of the cost savings for the legislation. Unfortunately, CBO also resists scoring the costs savings from prevention. Sen. Tom Harkin made a good statement about this very problem:
http://harkin.senate.gov/blog/?i=80d963c1-fd95-4850-94ea-542b00a651e4
In the long run, making medical research a priority will allow us to cure diseases, as opposed to managing them for years and years in the current system. The ultimate cost savings could be realized by CURING heart disease, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, etc. But for that, we need more research.