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report
April 30, 1996
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Health Care
Growth in spending on health care programs is one of the central fiscal challenges facing the federal government. Health care spending per person has grown faster than the nation's economic output per person by about 1 1/2 percentage points per year, on average, for the past few decades. This rapid growth poses a challenge for federal health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid, and also for state and local governments and for the private sector. CBO devotes a large share of its resources to studying proposals that would make narrow or broad changes in the nation's systems for delivering and financing health care.