Misinformation and wishful thinking about Medicare's sustainability

When capturing the short-term trend, a five-year average metric has the effect of smoothing out aberrant years and is just long enough to isolate the effects of the most recent policy regime. [...] Methodological and conceptual errors in the articles produced invalid analyses and grossly misleading con- clusions about the sustainability of government health spending under the Medicare policy model. [...] A detailed critical analysis of the main flaws in the Dhalla and Béland articles appears below, followed by an accurate analysis of the sustainability of government health expenditure growth in Canada. [...] The ratio of public health spending to revenue measures the ability of government to pay from current revenues. [...] The Misinformation and Wishful Thinking about Medicare’s Sustainability August 2007 10 metric also includes the impact on revenue growth from the long-term general increase in the tax burden and counts revenue from all sources including taxes and fees, federal transfers, crown corporations, investments and other operations of government.