Abstract

Costs, blogs, and rationing. In 1985 I was invited to take part in an Office of Technology Assessment project on the impact new technologies would have on the future of Medicare. The study concluded that those technologies would cause great problems, inexorably driving up costs. Some limits would, sooner or later, have to be set on Medicare spending. I was immediately hooked by that problem, wrote a book about it, and have followed it ever since. Yet even though the problem of rising Medicare costs was identified nearly twenty-five years ago, not much was done about it, and it became politically hazardous even to talk about it. Now it has become an immediate issue, but the rhetoric of urgency and the cost ..