OBAMACARE Will Save 2.6 Trillion says a new study

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/06/21/u-s-will-spend-2-6-trillion-less-on-health-care-than-expected-before-obamacare-study-projects/?tid=pm_business_pop_b

A new study predicts that the federal forecast of national health care spending under President Obama's signature health law was a big overestimate — by $2.6 trillion over a five-year period.

Expanding health insurance coverage to millions of Americans was bound to increase overall spending. After the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010, the actuaries for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services projected that, as the economy recovered, the historically low growth in health spending would return to higher levels, reaching $4.6 trillion by 2019. But in the intervening years, the annual expenditure increases have been more modest than expected, and the new estimate from the Urban Institute suggests national health spending is on to track reach $4 trillion by 2019.

"When CMS originally made those projections, they really thought the slowdown in health-care spending [growth] was mostly due to the recession, and afterward we'd see a return to the higher rates of spending growth — and that didn't really happen," said Katherine Hempstead, a senior adviser at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which funded the new study by the Urban Institute.

[The sobering thing doctors do when they die]

Looking forward, the study's authors also point to recent evidence that a 2014 uptick in health spending that had seemed to signal a return to higher growth may have been temporary. If slower growth persists, they argue that it will become harder to argue that it is just the economy and not the cost containment policies enabled by the Affordable Care Act that are tempering spending.

Hempstead said it's becoming increasingly plausible that the federal policies included in the Affordable Care Act — and its ripple effects as programs implemented within Medicare influence the private market — are having a tempering effect.

It's incredibly tricky to dissociate the cause of any particular policy on the effect of health-care spending. In addition to the Great Recession, reimbursement cuts because of sequestration would have had an effect on spending and the Supreme Court decision to make the expansion of Medicaid optional also reduced spending compared with the original projection.

A Kaiser Family Foundation analysis from 2013 found that about three-quarters of the slowdown could be traced to the sluggish economy, and attributed the rest of it to various other factors.