Health care in the U.S. is undergoing a dramatic transformation, that is clear. What is not as clear is where health care will end up by 2010. Expensive advancing technology and therapeutics, including function-enhancing bionics, help health care's share of the GNP grow to 17 percent by 2005. Health care providers shift to forecasting and then managing illness far earlier and more successfully. Poverty and lack of access to health care persist.
Most states follow Oregon in consciously setting priorities.
Heroic measures for terminal patients decline and more frugal, yet successful, approaches to innovation are adapted. Health care's percentage of the GNP is reduced to 11 percent by 2001. What failed during the Eighties worked very well over the next two decades. Markets, including health care, now do a much better job of giving consumers a range of high-quality services, delivered in convenient ways at relatively low cost over the long term, while maintaining a high degree of innovation. These amazing changes are coupled with better social policies to blunt the inequities and lack of access that accompany the stronger market approach.