And it’s about to get much worse. On Christmas Eve, the Senate passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which further expands Medicaid and Medicare’s roles in the U.S. healthcare system.

Much of the rationale behind the current reform of the healthcare system is about controlling inflation in healthcare costs. However, based on the trend presented above, a better alternative to the semi-nationalization that the president has in mind would be to increase individual responsibility for medical decisions and costs. When people aren’t exposed to the true cost of their care—even if they pay for it in foregone wages and higher taxes—they consume more.

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