America’s health care bill is turning out to be a lot smaller than economists and Republican naysayers thought it would be by this point.
That’s the conclusion of a new paper by John Holahan and Stacey McMorrow, researchers at the non-partisan Urban Institute. The aim of the paper is to tally up all the expenditures the country will make on health care between 2014 and 2019, whether it’s through private insurance, government programs like Medicare and Medicaid or direct out-of-pocket payments from patients to doctors.
In 2010, just after the Obamacare was passed, the government’s official actuaries at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services predicted that total national health spending for the five-year period starting in 2014 would be $23.6 trillion.
Using the latest data, Holahan and McMorrow have calculated that spending over that interval will probably be $21 trillion -- in other words, the total will be $2.6 trillion less than the government's number crunchers thought it would be.
That’s a pretty big windfall. You can think of it as $2.6 trillion that the country had expected to spend on health care but will likely have available for other purposes.
The finding is consistent with other recent data, like the Kaiser Family Foundation/HRET annual survey of employer-sponsored premiums (which have been rising at very slow rates) and the government’s official data on overall health care spending from 2010 through 2012.
Thank you President Obama. Republicans were completely wrong and you handed them their ass - AGAIN!
Watch all the Republican butthurt to follow. It will be fun to watch.
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