Eswar Prasad

I think we need to come to grips with the fact that the incentives in our system are hugely misaligned.

When you think about health care, if you think about incentives for retirement savings, many of these things need to be dealt with as a matter of policy.

And the health care system is really gummed up right now.

And as we have an aging population, as we have...

demographic projections indicating that especially with the tighter immigration policies, we are going to have a population that is certainly not growing and will perhaps start shrinking.

We need to start thinking more seriously about generating more resources and using them a lot more effectively.

And if we have this huge debt overhang above us, that is going to have

serious implications, as we were discussing earlier, with more and more of government revenues going towards just paying off the interest on that debt.

And there is no real path to fiscal restraint unless we can deal with entitlements.

What I worry about, though, is that the Trump administration

True to its word, has been attacking entitlements, but it's been attacking entitlements that ultimately are, again, part of the social safety net.

If you start cutting or making Medicare and Medicaid payments in particular much more difficult to access, that's going to be hard.

We need better incentives, certainly.

I mean, as you pointed out, you know, obesity is a problem in the US that there are other solutions for.

But, you know, if you think about most health care plans for proactive, you know,

care that comes ahead of major problems arising.

We don't really have enough coverage.

And we certainly need to think about the system of health insurance we have right now, which is largely employer-based and especially, going back to an earlier conversation, at a time when there is a huge amount of churn in the American economy from

industries doing well to those not doing so well.

If we leave people without this protective mechanism, it's just going to increase the cost of the system and lead to worse outcomes.