“National healthcare spending trends are unsustainable in the long term,” President Donald Trump’s budget acknowledges.
An article published earlier this month in the medical policy journal Health Affairs buttresses this simple point. Medical inflation stands to outpace both economic growth and actual inflation. Our spending — government, individual, business, etc. — on healthcare, projected to increase 5.5 percent annually over the next nine years, pushes the total to $5.7 trillion a year by 2026.
That accounts for 19.7 percent of the projected gross domestic product. Put another way, American healthcare spending in 2026 equals the entire size of the 1990 U.S. economy and eclipses the current gross domestic product of every other country not named China. It’s not that we spend more on healthcare than every other country — we spend more on healthcare than every other country, save China, spends on everything.
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