How health-care costs stopped rising

For a long time, health care was eating the world. From 1950 to 2009 American spending on hospitals, medics and the like rose from 5% of gdp to 17%. Between the late 1970s and the mid-2010s British public spending on health rose by 4% a year in real terms, much faster than the economy’s growth of 2% a year. From 1980 to 2010 overall French prices rose by 150%; the price of caring for a sick or old person rose by 250%. Among economists, the proposition “health care’s share of gdp rises” was almost as close to an iron law as “free trade is good” or “rent controls do not work”.