President Barack Obama’s signature health law has helped spur stronger economic growth by contributing to slower increases in healthcare prices and spending, the White House said on Wednesday.
The White House’s assertion of the economic benefits of the law commonly called Obamacare runs counter to the views of many critics, who say it is raising insurance premiums and chilling job creation.
A report by the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), an office within the White House, said that healthcare spending grew at an estimated average 1.3 percent rate per capita over the three years since 2010, the lowest rate on record for any three-year period.
It said the law has contributed to slower growth in healthcare prices because of a provision that reduces overpayments of the Medicare program for the elderly to private insurers and medical providers. Reforms that have cut the rates at which people are re-admitted to hospital have also helped, it said.
Yes, the same law that has seen nothing go right during its implementation and has only accomplished leaving millions uninsured is magically having a positive economic effect.
OR…it could just be that this administration is still presiding over a tanking economy five years later.
But a spokesmen for U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner, a Republican from Ohio, said in response that a January study by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services cited the recession, rather than the health law, as responsible for slow growth in health spending.
“The government’s non-partisan actuaries report this is the result of the terrible economy under President Obama, not his health care law,” Boehner press secretary Brendan Buck said in an email. “The White House is, in effect, celebrating its own failure to create jobs.”
Hope. Change.
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