Computational modeling and flow diverters: a teaching moment.

gross domestic product plus a small percentage. If one used data from recent years, both of these metrics would only slow the growth of health spending relative to the size of the economy as a whole. We do not expect that Baumol’s hypothesis will be proved false, but one may reasonably hope that the previously inexorable expansion of the fraction of our national effort that is devoted to health care may proceed more slowly than it has since the Medicare program began in the 1960s. Perhaps, when observing from some future vantage point, we will attribute a large part of our social progress to medical improvements and see a society in which health care has not consumed all of the increases in wealth that our ingenuity has created. Perhaps when health care spending has increased as Baumol’s hypothesis predicts, at least we will see that the money has been allocated as effectively as possible.