for example, make utility or mortgage payments on time or finance the education of the family’s children.

3. The future growth in national health spending should be constrained to fall significantly below currently projected spending growth, which has the United States devoting about 40 percent of its G.D.P. to health care by midcentury.

All other goals are subordinate to these three overarching goals, as are the means to reach them.

All other goals? Many of us hope that one goal is to preserve the US system as the last bastion of innovation in the development of new drugs and new treatment methods. Europe, by way of contrast, has bent their cost curve, in the short run anyway, by underinvesting in that sort of thing.

ERRATA: From the WaPo:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2009/06/19/DI2009061902140.html