Health Care Spending Boom Continues -- A Correction

An alert reader writes in to point out an error in the below blog item that should be corrected for the record.

I incorrectly read the report from the economists at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which showed that nominal health care spending rose 6.9 percent in 2005. That was, in fact, only slightly higher than the nominal increase in GDP of 6.2 percent, as they claimed. I compared the 6.9 percent to the inflation-adjusted increase of GDP increase of 3.2 percent, without adjusting the health care spending number for inflation.

The article should have pointed out that in the most recent year for which statistics are available, health care spending rose at twice the rate of inflation, not twice the rate of growth for the economy as a whole. My apologies to readers and to the authors of the report, who choice of words I erroneously questioned.