♡bamaCare!!! supporters have been happy to take credit for declining increases in health care costs, even though the decline began in 2005, when Evil George W Bush was President, and millions of Uninsured-Americans were dying in the streets right in front of overcrowded hospitals because nobody cared. I wonder what they’ll make of this news:
The national medical bill may be back to growing faster than gross domestic product. After five years of historically slow growth, new data show U.S. health-care spending accelerated significantly in 2014.
The analysis, from the Altarum Institute research group and based on preliminary government data, shows health spending increasing by 5 percent last year, compared to 3.6 percent in 2013. If confirmed by the final tally, health-care spending during 2014 would mark the biggest jump since before the recession.
Now it would be unfair, or at least premature, to pin all of last year’s rise on ♡bamaCare!!!, even though millions of mandate-customers on the exchanges were forced to pay for coverage for things like acupuncture, psychoanalysis, and prenatal care — even if they were of the opinion that acupuncture and psychoanalysis are big steaming crocks, and regardless of whether they were planning on having a baby, or even in possession of a uterus.
That aside, it does go to show that simply waving the magic wand of law cannot repeal the law of supply and demand. And it might go to show that health care spending is far less inelastic than the Left claims — that people really do buy more of it when they have more money to spend, and buy less of it when they have less money to spend.
Whatever the case turns out to be, it’s becoming clear that ♡bamaCare!!! has done far less than advertised, except for needlessly disrupting millions and millions of lives in order to provide overpriced and difficult-to-use “coverage” for a few million others.
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