September 10, 2010
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING:
Health Plan Won’t Fuel Big Spending, Report Says (ROBERT PEAR, 9/09/10, NY Times)
A new government study says President Obama’s health care law will have negligible effects on total national health spending in the next 10 years, neither slowing nor fueling the explosive growth of medical costs. [...]“In the aggregate,” said Andrea M. Sisko, the principal author of the report, “it appears that the new law will have a moderate effect on health spending growth rates and the health care share of the economy.”
In 2009, the report said, national health spending, public and private, totaled $2.5 trillion and accounted for 17.3 percent of the economy, as measured by the gross domestic product. The report predicts that health spending will rise to $4.6 trillion and account for 19.6 percent of the economy in 2019.
By contrast, in February, before passage of the comprehensive health care law, the same team of government experts, using the same economic and demographic assumptions, predicted that national health spending would reach $4.5 trillion, or 19.3 percent of the gross domestic product, in 2019.
One would like to give the bill credit for at least expanding coverage, except that all it does is require folks who don't consume health care to pay for insurance anyway.
