In a March 9th ABC News piece titled “Why Health Care Costs Keep Rising: What You Need to Know,” Huma Khan identifies five “drivers of cost increases” including: medical technology; administrative costs; disease and aging; medical malpractice; and prescription drugs. This is a decent list; technology and an aging population are definitely big contributors to rising health care costs.

But as Jason Fodeman and Robert Book detail, none of the factors mentioned above are the true driver health care costs:

To a large extent, increased health care spending is a consequence of this third-party payment system. In recent decades, the

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This Sunday on ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos twice misrepresented a recent Congressional Budget Office report on the costs of the recently passed Waxman-Markey climate cap and trade legislation. First he interrupted President Barack Obama strategist David Axelrod asserting that the EPA pegged the cost of Waxman-Markey at “about $150 a year.” Later he through the same talking point at Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) asking:

And [Axelrod] did point to these Congressional Budget Office numbers which show it’s only about a $150 in 2020 for an average family.

First lets focus on the two facts Stephanopoulos got blatantly wrong: … Continue Reading