“The [Affordable Care Act] is projected to . . . increase cumulative spending by roughly $621 billion” from 2014 to 2022. To be clear, that’s spending on top of the normal health-care inflation that would have happened if Obamacare had not been passed. So much for “bending down the cost curve,” as the president often liked to say his law would do.
Yesterday, over at my Forbes blog, my colleague Chris Conover paid tribute to those three Harvard economists and their favored president, by employing the same arithmetic they did to calculate how much more Americans would spend on health care due to Obamacare. He took the $621 billion, divided by the U.S. population, and multiplied by four.
“Simplistic?” Chris asked. “Maybe, but so too was the President’s campaign promise. And this approach allows us to see just how badly that promise fell short of the mark.
What the law will done to our health expenses has yet to be really felt. But what it’s already done to everything else is hideous. Even if it did somehow magically bend the cost curve down, it would still need to be repealed.
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