Minnesota Lawyer

The growth in Medicare costs continues to be slow, in what is perhaps the most encouraging fiscal development for the U.S. in decades. If the health care system is to continue to provide better value for Americans, policy makers need to seize this moment. Sadly, they are instead largely sitting on the sidelines.

Over the past few years, many nations have adopted policies that promise to improve people’s lives while preserving their freedom of choice. These approaches, informed by behavioral economics, are sometimes called nudges. Nudges include disclosure policies, as in the idea that borrowers should “know before they owe.”

A new set of projections released last week by Medicare’s actuaries has drawn much attention, in part because it suggests the deceleration in the growth of health costs we’ve seen over the past few years is ephemeral. The actuaries attribute the slowdown to the “lingering effects of the economic downturn and sluggish recovery” and to increases in cost sharing.

An odd puzzle is taking shape in the labor market: Over the past three years, the number of job openings has risen almost 50 percent, but actual hiring has gone up by less than 5 percent. Companies are advertising a lot more jobs, in other words, but not filling them.

Improving the U.S. health-care system requires encouraging low-value doctors and hospitals to practice as well as high-value ones do. The gap between the two is wide, but that only shows how much room we have for improvement.

News that the White House will propose a new cost-of-living index in the budget it releases this week has brought joy to deficit scolds and consternation to defenders of Social Security.

Roads, bridges and other infrastructure in the United States are steadily growing older and weaker. Given low interest rates and elevated unemployment, this is an ideal moment to invest in fixing them.

New evidence that the slowdown in health care costs over the past five years is happening not only because of a weak economy comes from the Economic Report of the President, released in mid-March by the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.

As the U.S. population ages, and with the effects of the financial crisis promising to linger for some time, economic growth will be lower than we would like. This is why the federal government needs to do more to help Americans earn college degrees.

If you want a concrete example of the unanticipated harm that could come from the United States going over the fiscal cliff, look no further than Build America Bonds, an efficient and alternative way to subsidize state and local investments.