dr. fuhrman today to you. as many of you probably already know dr. fuhrman serves as 28th chairman of the president's council of economic advisors. he has been with president obama since the very beginning of his administration, previously holding position of principle deputy director of the national economic council. that is a very important and wonderful position. i can personally attest. it is held only by the most brilliant of people. dr. fuhrman, prior to that has held a variety of posts in public policy and research before coming on with president obama. he has done work at the world bank. he has been a senior fellow at brookings institution and center for budget and policy priorities. he had stints at act keep yaw, visiting position at nyu wagner school of public policy. dr. fuhrman's research covers extremely wide range of areas including fiscal policy, tax policy, health economics, social security, and domestic and international macroeconomics. he is the editor of two books on economic policy and holds a phd in economics from harvard universi

dr. fuhrman is smarter than me. so with that, help me welcome dr. jason fuhrman. thank you. [ applause ] >> i'm not going to hold myself up against a quantum chemist. but thank you so much, chuck, for that introduction. thanks for organizing this discussion today. and i thought i would start with something really simple, because when we talk about health care, often our vocabulary flips around. i want to talk about the difference between cost and spending. cost is how much it cost to buy something, how much it cost to buy a shirt or a candy bar or a meal at a restaurant. and in those contexts, we rarely get the word wrong. spending is how much it costs for something multiplied by how much of it we spend in total on shirts, how much we spend in total on candy or restaurants. and that spends on both the price and the quantity. when it comes to health care, these two have somewhat different evaluations. as a general rule, any time we can slow the growth of cost, that is the growth of prices, in this case, the price of an aspirin or the price of a treatment for heart