The Wall Street Journal ran a piece touting Democratic Congressman Jim Cooper's concerns about the deficit. Mr Cooper likes to scare people about the size of the deficit by expressing the projected deficit over the next 70 years in trillions of dollars. This makes the deficit sound very scary but conveys no information to readers, since they have no idea what a $50 trillion deficit over the next 60 years means. (It comes to about 6 percent of projected GDP.) If the intention is to convey information rather to advance Mr. Cooper's agenda of scaring people, then there is no excuse from not expressing the deficits as a share of GDP. It is also important to note that the overwhelming majority of this deficit stems from projections showing that U.S. health care costs will get ever further out of line with health care costs in other wealthy countries. If per person health care costs in the United States were comparable to those in other wealthy countries (all of whom have longer life expectancies than the United States) then there would be no long-term deficit problem. If the power of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries and other interest groups make the reform of the U.S. health care system politically impossible, then we could achieve enormous savings by simply allowing Medicare beneficiaries to buy into the health care systems of countries with more efficient systems than us. Apparently, Mr. Cooper and is not interested in exposing the U.S. health care system to international competition.
--Dean Baker
