Employers throughout West Michigan continue to feel the crushing impact of rising healthcare costs. Nationally, year-over-year increases in health insurance premium costs have exceeded the overall inflation rate since 2000 by about a four-to-one margin. Figure 1-1 highlights the magnitude of...

The essay in the 2005 annual report summarizes the themes and consensus-based prescriptions for action that emerged from the Boston Fed's 50th economic conference, Wanting It All: The Challenge of Reforming the U.S. Health Care System, held in June 2005.

The share of health-care spending in GDP has been rising rapidly in the United States and other advanced industrial countries since at least 1960. As Jones (2005) and others have argued, the rapid increase in the price of medical care likely is demand-driven to a large degree, reflecting the...