
Perfect. Old traditions die hard, huh? At least, a lot harder than Healthcare.gov.
Health Care’s Cost Curve Is Turning Into a Squiggy Line, Mostly Upward
May 2013: Health care’s “cost curve” is bending down! Credit Obamacare!
“National health spending grew by 3.9
percent each year from 2009 to 2011, the lowest rate of growth since the
federal government began keeping such statistics in 1960,” reports the
Kaiser Family Foundation. Early data suggest that the numbers held into
2012. So the curve hasn’t just bent; it has bent more than ever.
Last week, the Obama administration’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued a rather different prediction:
that “the [Affordable Care Act] is projected to . . . increase
cumulative spending by roughly $621 billion” from 2014 to 2022. To be
clear, that’s spending on top of the normal health-care inflation that
would have happened if Obamacare had not been passed. So much for
“bending down the cost curve,” as the president often liked to say his
law would do.
The White House issued a 29-page report
that says, among other things, the once out-of-control health spending
trends in the U.S. have been tamed to the point where medical inflation
is just over 1%.
Health spending growth is the lowest on
record, the report contends, up an average annual rate of 1.3% over the
past three years. That’s less than one-third the historical average
dating back to 1965.
Health care spending rose at the fastest
pace in 10 years last quarter, a development that could foreshadow
higher costs for consumers this year.
Expenses for health care rose at a 5.6%
annual rate in the fourth quarter, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said
last week. The jump triggered a sharp upward revision in the
government’s estimate of consumer spending overall and accounted for
nearly a quarter of the economy’s 2.6% annualized growth in the last
three months of 2013.
Driving the increase was an $8 billion rise
in hospital revenue — more than the previous four quarters combined,
according to the Census Bureau and Royal Bank of Scotland. RBS economist
Omair Sharif says the increase in hospitals’ income was puzzling
because the number of inpatient days dipped 1% during the fourth
quarter.
In the meantime, thank you, Obamacare.
U.S seniors — those aged 65 and older —
have moved from a reliably Democratic group to a reliably Republican one
over the past two decades. From 1992 through 2006, seniors had been
solidly Democratic and significantly more Democratic than younger
Americans. Over the last seven years, seniors have become less
Democratic, and have shown an outright preference for the Republican
Party since 2010.
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