B. Hussein Obama saved you a bundle

There seems to have been some question about whether the ACA actually reduced health care costs. The answer,from the Office of the Actuary of the Department of Health and Human Services, is that it cumulatively from 2010 to 2017 the ACA reduced health care spending a total of $2.3 trillion. Savings in 2017 alone were $650 billion.No doubt this will be a headline story at Fox News.Update: A reader has drawn my attention to certain mendacious comments by industrial shills on Dr. Emanuel ' s article. So let me make a couple of things clear:In some of the state exchanges, premiums increased after the first year of the ACA. This is because insurance companies competed for customers in the first year, and to some extent underestimated what their costs would be in part because previously uninsured people tend to be expensive when they finally do get insurance. This is not to be confused with total spending on health care in the U.S. (Thanks to the subsidies in the ACA, consumers do not actually pay for these increases out of pocket, BTW.)Second, health care spending in the U.S. has historically increased at greater than the rate of inflation, i.e. health care spending takes a growing share of GDP year after year. The ACA did not reverse this trend, but substantially reduced it.Here is a more detailed discussion:In 2010, the government predicted that Medicare costs would rise 20 percent in just five years. That ’s from $12,376 per beneficiary in 2014 to $14,913 by 2019. Instea...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs