During the last decades, healthcare costs in all Western countries continuously increased. An adequate healthcare policy must be based on realistic expectations about the development of healthcare costs in the years to come. In this paper, some projections of future healthcare costs in the Netherlands are made, using cost-of-illness data for 1994, population forecasts and quantitative insight in the cost development in the past. It is concluded that Dutch healthcare costs will increase in the next decades by an annual rate of 2.4%. This projected cost increase consists of increasing healthcare use due to demographic change (0.9-1.0%), developments in epidemiology and technology (1.1-1.2%) and of price and wage developments in healthcare which exceed general inflation by 0.3%.