WASHINGTON – House Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt (D-SC) issued the following statement today following the release of the Congressional Budget Office’s long-term outlook for health care spending.

“CBO is to be credited for its report on the future of health care spending, but the numbers in this report need to be interpreted with some caution.   CBO’s outlook uses a new methodology with certain constraining assumptions in order to project current-law health spending over the long-run. Therefore, its results are not directly comparable to previous projections by CBO and others.  Nonetheless, CBO’s outlook confirms what we know, which is that we face a serious long-term budget challenge, driven in no small part by growing health care costs.  Indeed, the long-term budget challenge is bound up with cost growth in the health care sector of our economy.  There is a growing consensus that making Medicare and Medicaid sustainable over the long run requires that we deal with the larger forces causing inefficiency and excess cost growth in health care overall.  As we learn how to get better value for our health care dollar, we must apply those lessons to the public as well as the private sector.”

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