Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Rogoff on the New Red Threat

In the Financial Times (subscription required), my colleague Ken Rogoff opines on fiscal policy. This excerpt is notable:
Medical care involves far trickier challenges in balancing redistribution and incentives for quality care and innovation. It is one thing to guarantee everyone equal access to medical care when health expenditures account for 5 per cent of GDP, as they did in the early 1950s in the US. It is another thing to do so when health expenditures reach 16 per cent of GDP as they do today and it will be even more problematic if expenditures rise to 30 per cent of GDP, as some leading economists such as David Cutler, Robert Hall and Charles Jones have predicted. With healthcare at 30 per cent of GDP, efforts to maintain equality may begin to seem like Marxism.