Health Care Spending Curve Bent Upwards

Remember all that crap about how Obamacare was going to reduce health care spending and make the United States more competitive in the global market? 

 It was all bullshit. Obamacare made it worse.

CMS published its findings this morning in Health Affairs. The report also projects that once all the data are in, health spending in 2010 will have grown a historically low 3.9 percent — slightly lower than the previous record low growth of 4 percent in 2009.

That’s an aftershock of the recession, which cost millions of people their jobs and, consequently, their health insurance, slowing medical spending.

At a Health Affairs forum Wednesday, CMS chief actuary Rick Foster, who has a record of questioning long-range spending projections based on overly optimistic assumptions, nonetheless said that “we like to think that the reality in 2014 will be much closer to the projections” than similar projections from the past.

If implemented as written, the health care law will “create a whole new world of health care spending,” Foster said.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0711/60112.html#ixzz1TUuPxv9t