The Sad History of Cost Containment as Told in One Chart

As the nation once again faces double digit increases in health care costs, the seemingly unanswerable question of how to control the problem has suddenly returned to the nation’s radar screen. This analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, published in the January 23, 2002 online version of the journal Health Affairs (under Web Exclusives) traces the effectiveness of government and private sector attempts to reign in health care costs over the past three decades and finds that no approach that has been tried in the past 35 years has had a lasting impact.

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