Double Your Spending, Double Your Fun
The Hill's Sam Baker points out yet another delightful fun fact from yesterday's Congressional Budget Office report on the Budgepocalypse: spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and other government health care programs is expected to double in the next decade, rapidly outpacing GDP. By 2022, the CBO predicts it will eat up about seven percent of the country's total economic output and cost the nation about $1.8 trillion annually. And that's only if Congress fails to prevent Medicare payments to physicians from falling by nearly 30 percent—which almost no one thinks is going to happen. Fixing the doc fix will add another $316 billion or so to the tab.
Lots more on the 2012 Budgepocalypse here.