The insurance industry’s blame-everything-on-medicines rhetoric simply does not hold up to the facts. Just this week, the federal government projected that, even with new treatments for hepatitis C, high cholesterol and cancer, medicines will continue to account for just 10 percent of health care spending through the next decade, the same share as in 1960. It is time for a more balanced discussion of health care costs that moves beyond simple sound bites and political rhetoric and considers the big picture.
