On NPR’s All Things Considered, December 11, 2008, Uwe Reinhardt, professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, called the health care sector the “strongest economic locomotive working for us.” He estimated that by 2015, health care will be one-fifth the size of the U.S. economy and said this is a good time to expand health insurance coverage for the uninsured.
What he doesn’t say is that it will take us a while to control health care costs, even if we started trying to reduce costs right now. In fact, health care costs will go up before they go down. So delaying real health care reform because of the role of health care as an economic engine is just silly.
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