Description: COVID has washed over healthcare like a tsunami. According to Medicare actuaries, trends have been turned upside down in 2021, but will reverse back in 2023 as medical costs rebound. It is more prudent to base projections on long run trends for a period after the storm, extrapolating from 2026 forward, leaving the intervening turbulence (years 2022 -2025) mostly unspecified.

Description: The aftershocks of the COVID pandemic will pass --- eventually. Government subsidies and spending soared in 2020 to meet the challenges of the pandemic. Health expenditures leapt from 17.6% of GDP to 19.7%, and then dropped to 18.8% in 2021, and will fall again to 18.2% (projected) in 2022, but are expected to return to the long-run trend by 2024 and gradually rise thereafter. However, during the next few years most attention will be paid to dealing with complex aftershocks from the flood of Covid funding in 2020 and 2021, a surge of inflation in 2022, and a looming recession in 2023.