Using Deceptive Numbers on Health Care in the NYT

It is really easy and apparently fun for some people to use scary numbers about health care costs. The trick is to take numbers over a long period of time that are not adjusted for inflation or income growth. Of course no normal person has any idea what their income will look like in nominal dollars 50-60 years out, so you can scare people to death with this sort of stupid trick.

That is what David Goldhill, the chief executive of GSN, did in an oped in the NYT. He told readers about a newly...