I didn't think this would really start happening until the State exchanges came on line this October, but Forbes is reporting that unexpectedly Obamacare is already "bending the healthcare cost curve":
A new Congressional Budget Office report out last week has the healthcare world scratching its head over the possibility that Obamacare might—in part—be responsible for what is being described as a significant slowdown in the growth of healthcare costs in America.
According to the report, hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending for Medicare and Medicaid are being removed from government projections as federal healthcare spending is now expected to be full 15 percent less than what had been initially budgeted for 2012. The surprisingly low spending projections come as the growth in healthcare spending has hit a new low for the fourth consecutive year.
To be sure, a big part of the decline in healthcare spending is the result of the recession’s impact on people’s ability to lay out cash on health related expenditures. Indeed, up until this point, most analysts have agreed that the poor economy was pretty much the sole cause for the improvement we have seen in containing the explosion of healthcare spending.
Now, experts are beginning to recognize that the Affordable Care Act may, in fact, be contributing to the good news—a significant development as bending the cost curve was a primary goal of Obamacare.
I encourage you to read the whole article.
When I argue about Obamacare with family and friends who are skeptics, my first line of defense is that Massachusetts' similar healthcare plan drastically reduced the number of uninsured. Now, ahead of schedule it appears, it looks like healthcare costs are being reined in.
I kind of have the feeling that 20 years from now the GOP is going to rue the day they cynically elevated the term ObamaCare into the lexicon. In the more immediate future, I think GOP Governors are going to be hard pressed to keep up their tea party grandstanding once people see costs contained and the rolls of uninsured sheared.