Dr Dean Baker 2 27 19 MIIS Medium

Title: Budget Horror Stories: Health Care and the Future of the National Deficit

Speaker: Dr. Dean Baker, Senior Economist & Co-Founder, Center for Economic and Policy Research

Description: We continually hear horror stories about future budget deficits in the United States. What we don’t hear, overlooked by press and policy makers alike, is that future deficits are driven largely by projections of rising health care costs.

If health care costs are stabilized, we won’t have serious budget problems. If they are not stabilized, then we will face serious economic problems regardless of what happens with the deficit. Dr. Dean Baker, Senior Economist & Co-Founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research discusses his research on the future of health care costs and the national budget. Following his talk, Dr. Jason Scorse, Director of the Center for the Blue Economy and Chair of the International Environmental Policy program at the Middlebury Institute, will moderate a discussion on a wide range of economic and social issues.

About the Speaker: Dean Baker co-founded the Center for Economic and Policy Research in 1999. His areas of research include housing and macroeconomics, intellectual property, Social Security, Medicare and European labor markets. He is the author of several books, including Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. His blog, “Beat the Press,” provides commentary on economic reporting. He received his B.A. from Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan.

Suggested Reading: “Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer,” by Dr. Dean Baker.