Health care costs to continue skyrocketing

From Forbes:

Federal forecasters predict that U.S. health-care spending will double by 2016, to $4.1 trillion per year.

That’s one-fifth of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP).

Health spending in 2006 was projected at $2.1 trillion, or 16 percent of the GDP.

This is crazy. We need to implement a system that costs less and delivers more and we already have a good model: the Veterans Affairs system. Heck, Medicare is a better example than the private system we’ve got going on right now. More from the article:

“We haven’t solved the health-care cost problem,” stated Karen Davis, president of the Commonwealth Fund. “There was a lot of feeling when the 2006 numbers came out and we were growing at about 7 percent a year, that maybe it wasn’t a continuing problem. But, I think even growing at 7 percent a year you see that by 2016 we are going to be spending 20 percent of the nation’s economy on health care. I think it says we’ve got to get serious about doing something that really improves the efficiency of the health-care system and not just shifting money.”