Mounting Medicare costs in the U.S.(Correction, Please!)

Americans should not be smug. We are moving closer to Canadian-style healthcare than many realize, as the government takes over responsibility for more of our healthcare system. Healthcare spending in the U.S. has jumped from about 5 percent of GDP in 1960 to 16 percent by 2004, according to the White House. Worse, almost half of the "healthcare dollars" spent now are being spent by government, as the Wall Street Journal has noted. That unhealthy trend is headed up.

Medicare spending, per capita, has been skyrocketing at twice the rate of the country's Gross Domestic Product. The new prescription drug benefit, added in the so-called Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, will drive that spending even higher--since it increases Medicare's financial burden by more than a third, according to a Cato Institute briefing paper.

The "inevitable growth of Medicare alone," says the Wall Street Journal, "will lead us far down the path toward government-rationed health care a la Europe or Canada." The cost of the drug benefit was deliberately underestimated to help get it through Congress. Within ...