Evidence is spreading that health-care costs are growing much more slowly than before. Now, it's not just a flattening in Medicare spending; the deceleration has spread to employment, too. Last fall, in a generally skeptical analysis of the apparent slowdown in health-care costs, Harvard University economist Amitabh Chandra and co-authors noted that, because 57 percent of overall health-care expenditures are labor costs, "it seems unlikely that we would expect to see a permanent bending of the cost curve without a commensurate shift in employment rates." And at that point, they didn't see any such shift.
