Here’s an oft-cited figure in the debate over health care reform: U.S. health care expenditures—16 percent of gross domestic product in 2007—are outpacing GDP growth by so much that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) expects health care expenditures to balloon to 25 percent of GDP by 2025. By 2082, they’ll be closer to 50 percent of GDP. In other words, the health care cost curve is long—and it bends towards financial disaster.
Herein lies one of the principal reasons why our generation should care about health care reform: money. To put it bluntly, if allowed to continue on its present track, spending on health care will overwhelm the U.S. economy as our careers take off, as we start families, and as we enter middle age and beyond. Instead of funding infrastructure, education, or national defense, our nation’s wealth will be increasingly sucked into the black hole that is the U.S. health system, without improving quality of care.
This is not to say there isn’t also a moral argument to be made for universal health care—it boggles the mind that 46 million citizens of the wealthiest country in the world remain without basic health insurance. Not to mention that young people will reap significant short-term rewards from reform as well: eight million of the uninsured are between the ages of 18 and 24. But, ideology or short-term benefits aside, the looming financial health care crisis is something that all young people should be concerned about, because, in a few years, it’s going to be our problem.
This might explain part of the reason why young people consistently show higher levels of support for reform in opinion polls than the middle-aged and elderly.
But polling also demonstrates a troubling disengagement with the issue for our generation; in a recent Economist/YouGov poll, over 50 percent of those aged 18 to 29 said they knew “not much” or “nothing at all” about the current reform plans being considered by Congress.
So how exactly would the health care reform bills currently being considered help contain the cost of health care? At this point, it’s a bit unclear, which is part of the problem and is why Obama’s talk of “bending the curve” did little to increase support for reform in Washington or around the country.
One thing is clear: the status quo is untenable. And though the individual impact of the cost-related components of reforms is unknown and the components’ short-term effect might be minimal, their long-term net effect will likely lower costs significantly.
Take the Independent Medicare Advisory Council (IMAC), a group that would issue recommendations to the President regarding Medicare payment rates and Medicare reform. IMAC, which would be made up of appointed advisers relatively impervious to political influence, has the potential to improve Medicare’s effectiveness while decreasing cost by reducing waste and unnecessary spending. Its impact will be seen in the long term, but that shouldn’t stop Washington from supporting the establishment of IMAC. If anything, the fact that a proposal today will begin working tomorrow is all the more reason why young people should get behind it now.
The same is true for additional investments in health care Information Technology and comparative effectiveness research, which determines which treatments are best for different diseases. No one can tell how effective these measures will be, but they also will likely yield significant cost reductions in the long-run, provided we begin investing in them today.
These are all reforms which, right-wing fictions aside, should be welcome to those of nearly any ideological persuasion.
So what’s to be done? As Obama makes his final push for reform, I suggest we take advantage of the geographic diversity of Georgetown’s student body. It may seem pointless to contact your representative, but students from Maine, call up your senators. That goes for constituents of Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), and all of those Blue Dog Democrats, too. As for the rest of us, we’ll just have to sit with our fingers crossed, waiting for change to come.
