The spiraling cost of health care, rather than an aging society, is the real culprit in the dire forecasts of staggering budget deficits in decades to come, suggests Dean Baker in a posting on the blog .common sense.

Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic Policy and Research, cites Peter Orszag, the new head of the Congressional Budget Office, who has lately been saying that containing rising health care costs is a more effective way to head off fiscal Armageddon than to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits.

"The problem has been largely misdiagnosed including by economic analysts and ... many depictions in the media," Orszag told the Christian Science Monitor recently. "The long-term fiscal problem truly is fundamentally one involving the rate at which healthcare costs grow.... Social Security and aging are important, but it is not where the money is."

As Baker says, "The moral of Orszag's analysis is that those who are concerned about the huge deficits projected for future decades should be working first and foremost on reforming the health care system."

That course of action will also inflict pain, of course. Orszag's suggested remedies include increasing the percentage of costs borne by beneficiaries (to hold down demand), and limiting reimbursements to the cost of the most effective or efficient treatments -- sensible policies that may be less appealing if it's you or someone close to you that is facing a life-threatening illness.