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Ensuring the Fiscal Sustainability of Health Care Reform

List of authors.
  • Michael E. Chernew, Ph.D.,
  • Lindsay Sabik, B.A.,
  • Amitabh Chandra, Ph.D.,
  • and Joseph P. Newhouse, Ph.D.

Much of the recent health care reform debate has focused on achieving budget neutrality over a 10-year period, but this goal is less important than the reform's long-run fiscal sustainability. If the rate of growth of health care spending continues to exceed the rate of income growth by its historical margin of more than 2 percentage points, the consequences for beneficiaries, federal and state budgets, and the entire economy — given the implied increase in tax rates and forgone consumption — will be dire.1 For this reason, health care reform is an economic issue as much as, if not more . . .

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Funding and Disclosures

Financial and other disclosures provided by the authors are available with the full text of this article at NEJM.org.

This article (10.1056/NEJMp0910194) was published on December 9, 2009, at NEJM.org.

Author Affiliations

From the Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, Boston (M.E.C., L.S., J.P.N.); and the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (A.C.).

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