“Maybe you aren’t making any financial plans for the year 2082, but your grandchildren should be.  That is the year the Congressional Budget Office estimated that healthcare costs will have grown so great that they will account for fully half of the U.S. economy.

Rising healthcare costs are nothing new to Americans, but now they threaten to overtake not only every other sector of our economy, but our economy as a whole. 

In the long term, the American family has to start thinking today about how its members will earn and save enough to supply themselves with good health in the future.  The contradiction is plain enough – most healthcare, and most expensive healthcare, is required when the patient is a senior citizen.  Reliance on government benefit programs and a fixed income exaggerate the effects of cost increases on the ability to afford care.

Simply put: when your income doesn’t really change and the bills keep mounting – you cannot afford to pay your doctor for long.  Likewise, taxpayers contribute payroll taxes to accounts for Medicare and Medicaid, but that money pays for today’s retirees.  Every taxpayer depends on the workers of the future to make up the difference and keep Medicare going for them.

Mounting healthcare costs don’t just affect every paying patient, they also reach every American taxpayer who helps pay for the care others receive through government-administered benefit programs.

Careful planning is the key – both for families anticipating their own long-term medical care and for policymakers who are struggling with the similar burden which falls at the feet of taxpayers.

The same study of America’s healthcare system in 2082 looked at how the ballooning cost of care will also raise the public obligations of Medicare and Medicaid.  The picture there is far from rosy.  About 75 years from now, Medicare and Medicaid will account for 19 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product – 38 percent of total healthcare spending.

Discussing healthcare costs for the year 2082 might make it sound like we have a lot of time to solve this looming problem.  We do not.  How we reform our healthcare system, and how we assure that every American has access to the benefits they have earned in the workplace once they retire are issues we must start to address right now.

The mandate on us today, then, is to reduce costs.  There are some early opportunities to find savings: addressing new technologies and how they come into the market, creating studies that can show how effective a medication or treatment is versus its cheaper competition, encouraging preventative care before small health problems become big ones, and doing more, better health studies to target care for the general population.  On the government side, we need to get started right away to provide effective tools for care coordination and disease management that keep the quality of healthcare service high while minimizing the growth of fees and costs.  For millions of future Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries, these studies will provide security to them as well as to the taxpayers who support their benefits.

The best plans for the future of healthcare in our country depend on innovation and commonsense to drive cost-effective advancements in medicine and the way it is delivered to Americans.  A sustainable future in Medicare and Medicaid is much like a retirement account: it requires us to begin planning for tomorrow and to find savings in our budgets today.  Every policy measure and legislative proposal, many of which I sponsor in the U.S. House of Representatives, makes the year 2082 look a little less grim.”