Remember those decreases in the rate of increase in healthcare spending? Looks like those have come to an end:
After several years of historically low, sub-4 percent growth, national health spending is now expected to rise at 5.5 percent in 2014—the highest its been since 2007—actuaries at the federal government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reported yesterday. The report further projects that growth will increase slightly, on average, over the next decade, to 5.8 percent. The authors write that the latest growth estimate “primarily reflects” the effects of the health law’s major coverage expansions, as well as renewed economic growth and an aging population. Of these factors, Obamacare is the most significant, at least for the moment. The accelerated growth in 2014, the authors write, was “mostly driven by health insurance coverage expansions under the ACA, as 8.4 million Americans are anticipated to have gained insurance coverage primarily through Medicaid or the new health insurance Marketplaces.”
Whether the slowing rate of increase has always been hotly contended. Fans of the PPACA have been quick to credit the slowing to the law, however tenuous the relationship might be. Offhand I’m guessing they won’t be as quick to accept responsibility for a return to more rapidly rising costs.
My position remains as it has been for decades: healthcare costs rising faster than the non-healthcare rate of inflation is harmful to the economy and unsustainable. The healthcare reform we need is, as it has been, reform that will bring the rate of increase to an affordable pace. Getting more people to carry insurance does not appear, as some of the proponents claims, to reduce that rate of itself. A lot more work will be needed but as long as the PPACA sucks all the air out of the healthcare reform room we’re unlikely to see much movement in the right direction.
