Healthcare are the sole determinant of rising US debt – jumping up to 5.5% of GDP

AFTER DOUBLING TO $20 trillion since 2009, the national debt is now projected to soar to an unfathomable $92 trillion over the next 30 years. At that point, depending on interest rates, between 60 and 100 percent of all individual income taxes will go towards paying the interest on this debt.¶ What is driving the federal budget into bankruptcy? Health care spending.¶ [ OPINION: The Senate's Obamacare Repeal Effort Has a Fatal Flaw ]¶ The problem is not tax revenues (they will continue growing above historical averages), nor other spending programs (Social Security is the only other major category growing as a share of the GDP).¶ Rather, health care is devouring the budget.¶ Remember this as Congress debates Obamacare and Medicaid reform. Critics denounce Republican attempts to "slash health care spending." In reality, their proposals would slow the growth of health care spending relative to the current baseline projections – projections that are completely unsustainable anyway.¶ After staying between two and three percent of the economy in the 1980s and 1990s, federal health spending has jumped to 5.5 percent of GDP today, on its way to a projected 9.3 percent thirty years from now – and even that assumes a long-term slowdown in the growth of per-capita health care costs.¶ For context, the entire federal budget has remained around 20 percent of GDP for the past 50 years. Each percentage point of the GDP translates into $190 billion, or $1,500 per household. So that overall growth from 3 to 9.3 percent of GDP would eventually require a permanent tax increase of $9,450 per household – a figure that would rise with incomes each year.¶ Federal spending cannot grow faster than the economy indefinitely. At some point, something has to give. And the "easy solutions" are fool's gold:¶ [ SEE: EDITORIAL CARTOONS ON OBAMACARE ]¶ Cut defense? It is already on track to fall from 4.7 to 2.7 percent of GDP between 2010 and 2027 – leaving it at 1930s levels.¶ Tax the rich? The amount of annual income earned over the $1 million threshold currently totals 4.4 percent of GDP – one-third of which is already paid in federal taxes. At most, an additional one percent of GDP could be extracted before exorbitant marginal tax rates begin changing taxpayer behavior, harming the economy and costing revenue.¶ Single-payer health care? Sen. Bernie Sanders' 2016 proposal was scored as adding $32 trillion in new costs over the decade, in part because American proposals avoid the sacrifices and limitations that other countries mandate.¶ Just keep borrowing? According to the CBO baseline, the resulting national debt would bring crushing interest costs that eventually bankrupt the federal government.