Campaign Action
Hey Paul Ryan and team, top this with your long-awaited, not-really-a-plan Obamacare replacement plan. Oh, that's right. You can't, can you?
WASHINGTON — Twenty million or so more people have health insurance now than they did before Obamacare, and yet the American health care system is on track to spend $2.6 trillion less from 2014 to 2019 than before the Affordable Care Act became law.
That’s right — $2.6 trillion, which is equivalent to about 15 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. That’s the conclusion researchers at the Urban Institute came to when comparing health care spending projections made in 2010 before Congress passed the ACA, and projections made later that year after President Barack Obama enacted the statute, with more recent findings.
Just look at the chart:
The usual caveats apply:
This can't be all attributed to Obamacare because it coincided with a slow economic recovery, and healthcare spending usually drops during economic recessions. But, as Jeffrey Young says, "historical patterns don’t quite account for the fact that growth hasn’t reverted to the levels before Obamacare and before the Great Recession, when annual increases could reach into the double digits. […]" In fact, it increased about 4 percent a year from 2010-14 and is projected to rise 5 or 6 a year between now and 2019.
So, yeah, not bankrupting the country, not killing jobs, not taking people's health insurance away. Your move, Paul Ryan.