Spending more through “cost control”: Our obsessive quest to gut the hospital

There is reason to believe that by the year 2000 health spending will remain much below the alarming 18.9% of GDP that had been forecast by the CBO only 3 years ago.

Abstract

The data presented by Katharine Levit and colleagues in Health Care Spending in 1994: Slowest in Decades ''1 are both reassuring and puzzling. On the one hand, they confirm that the growth of national health care spending has descended markedly from the Congress iona l Budget Office's (CBO's) dire forecast of 1993, according to which health spending in 1994 would have exceeded 15 % of gross domestic product (GDP) (instead of the actual estimated 13.7%)} There is reason to believe that by the year 2000 health spending will remain much below the alarming 18.9% of GDP that had been forecast by the CBO only 3 years ago. At the same time, however, one wonders why the United States still spends close to 14% of its huge GDP on health care, when all other industrialized nations had succeeded in stabilizing that ratio below 10% as early as 1980 and have remained at those much lower levels so far) Much is made in this country of California's