Letters

Faster and Faster

Health care is a deeply complicated subject, and the same goes for economics, and when the two collide, the results can get pretty technical. Despite all this, in your April 3 issue, Yuval Levin (“Scoring the GOP Health-Care Plan”) does an excellent job of explaining the ill-fated plan’s virtues and flaws. Still, there were points in the piece where even this highly motivated reader had trouble following all the math. Consider, for example, this sentence (emphasis added): “Second, it assumes that Medicaid spending growth will accelerate much faster than overall health spending in the coming years . . .” If I understand properly, this means that the rate of change of the rate of change of the rate of change of Medicaid spending will be a lot bigger than the same figure for overall spending. Yikes! I don’t know what that means, but it sounds almost as scary as single-payer.