The boomers are coming but don't panic yet

The good people in the Office of the Actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services take great pains every year to summarize and explain their health spending forecast without spin or exaggeration. The editors of Health Affairs are perennially grateful to them for taking an approach that helps the journal fulfill its mission of providing clear and objective analysis to inform debates on health policy. Thus, it is perennially disappointing to see how casually the careful CMS analysis is inevitably overlooked to fit the doomsday scenarios anticipated by pundits and politicos, and how quickly the policy discourse prompted by the forecast deteriorates into the rote repetition of preconceived interpretations.