Two years ago, I and John Mantus, and Gaobo Pang (collectively, “WMP”) created a long-range macroeconomic growth simulation model to project the fiscal condition of the US government under current broad policies and economic trends. Although similar in many of its assumptions and methodologies to those used by the Social Security and Medicare Trustees in their annual Reports, and especially to the...
The strongest version of this narrative highlights the structural inefficiencies in the U.S. healthcare sector and the unsustainability of current fiscal policies. The authors deserve credit for explicitly modeling healthcare's role in economic growth, a critical oversight in many projections. Their critique of the CBO's assumptions—particularly around healthcare cost controls and discretionary spending—is well-founded, as historical trends often undermine legislative constraints.
However, the a...