I didn't quite realize this until Dean Baker pointed it out today, but US health care spending has been basically flat for over a decade:
Health care spending was 17.2% of GDP in 2009 and was slightly lower in 2022, coming in at 16.9%. We are more than 3 percentage points under the old pre-2009 trendline, which amounts to a savings of nearly a trillion dollars.
NOTE: My numbers are a little different from Dean's. I took mine straight from CMS and then subtracted COVID spending. This is a little tricky because CMS's explanation of COVID expenditures is confusing, but the unclear bits are relatively small. I chose the most conservative interpretation, which still puts current spending under 2009 spending.
I think that what this shows is that the erosion of the number of people covered was causing a pressure increasing the cost. By by increasing the number of people covered, one indirect effect of the ACA has been to flatten the curve. There is increased stability of cost by scaling up the number of people covered by health insurance. A naive and blunt picture: if only 100 people were covered by health insurance in the US, boy would they pay big premiums!
Probably more important are the various provisions of the ACA that were specifically intended to incentivize things that would reduce the upward pressure on costs. Some more institutional, some preventative medicine like free flu shots
Mr. Drum’s spending is up. Way up.
I've been pointing out for years that health care spending hasn't been increasing. The same is true for Japan after a pretty rapid rise the previous ten years.
Just one more case of unnecessary alarmism along with HIV, radiation from Fukushima, climate change in 2050 and 2100, Covid-19, Trump starting a nuclear war...
You should be alarmed at just how stupid you are. But that’s not how it works.
I’m not alarmed at your stupidity, but I’m not surprised either.
That's one of the things the Affordable Care Act was supposed to do. I think we now have enough data to say it's working.
Really, Kevin? I could have absolutely sworn that I learned this fact from you, some years ago. Is it possible you knew it once, and forgot you knew it? LOL.
But but but .... everything is terrible and getting worse!
How dare you blaspheme The Church of Doom?!
PS: Thanks, Obama/Biden!
Obamacare.
We've had socialized healthcare since Reagan signed the Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act, which requires hospitals to treat patients until they are "medically stable" without regard to ability to pay for services.
However, this was just about the stupidest form of socialized healthcare imaginable: you get nothing while your treatable condition degrades your health, then heroic procedures while you're at death's door.
With Obamacare, millions of people now have access to preventative and early treatment care, keeping them off of the highway to needing emergency care.
I remember medical costs flattening during the Obamacare debate. The companies were so scared we'd have serious reform that they forwent a few price increases for a year or two. My health insurance actually went down a few bucks for the only time ever. I doubt that's something I'll see again in my lifetime.
Then Obamacare started to trickle in, and may have had a real effect.