With every new report about the recent slowdown in healthcare spending there is speculation in the media that the problem of rising health costs has somehow been solved or cut down to size. We have seen this movie before. On a number of occasions in the past several decades we have been led to believe that the challenge of containing the growth in healthcare costs has been met. In the mid-1990s, it was the managed-care revolution. That was followed by the managed-care backlash, when the trend line for health-care costs headed back up. The idea that we have licked the problem of health-care cost increases is no more probable today than it was in the past.
