2) Healthcare cost
In January 2010, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the federal health spending would total a bit more than $11 trillion between 2011 and 2020.
Today, the Congressional Budget Office thinks it made a mistake. Costs are coming in lower-than-expected, and the CBO's newest projectionssuggest the federal government will spend $600 billion less on health care than they predicted back in 2010.
So far, so good: projections are always wrong by at least a bit, and it's nice to have the extra $600 billion in America's pocket.
But here's the incredible thing: as Paul Van de Water, a health care expert at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, points out, the January 2010 projection didn't include any of the spending associated with Obamacare. The latest projections include all of the spending associated with Obamacare.
Obamacare is costing way less than expected - Vox
Reducing overall health-care costs. Obamacare actually had two different fiscal responsibility goals. The first was simply to offset the cost of new coverage with a combination of spending cuts and higher taxes — which, according to the Congressional Budget Office, it did. The second, more ambitious goal was to change the incentives that made doctors and hospitals eager to charge more money regardless of its effect, and that gave people who pay for that insurance little means to shop for better deals. Obamacare’s architects hoped that, on top of merely paying for the cost of new coverage, they could “bend the cost curve” downward.
When the law passed, conservatives insisted it would increase rather than decrease health-insurance costs. (Esteemed conservative intellectual Yuval Levin, in 2010, insisted it “completely fails” to reduce overall health-care spending.) Since the law passed, health-care inflation has fallen to historically low levels. Conservatives have repeatedly insisted this was a blip that would soon be reversed, and seized upon any apparent evidence for this case. When health-care spending spiked in the first quarter of 2014,Megan McArdle announced vindication: “After all the speculation that Obamacare might be bending the cost curve, we now know that so far, it isn’t.” (It turned out the first-quarter spike in health-care spending was a preliminary miscount that has since been corrected.)
Also yesterday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid reported that health inflation in 2013 not only remained in, it fell to the lowest level since the federal government began keeping track
4 New Studies: Obamacare Working Incredibly Well -- NYMag
Insurance competition. Obamacare is based on an old Republican plan, developed by the Heritage Foundation and first tried by Mitt Romney, whose central feature was market competition. The animating premise was that forcing insurance companies to lure customers on an open, regulated marketplace would bring prices down.In all fairness, liberals did not place much faith in this dynamic. They didn’t accept a health-care plan that gave insurance companies a central role out of ideological conviction, but out of necessity — appeasing the industry, they calculated, offered them the only viable way to pass a bill through Congress. But the dynamic has turned out to work much better than expected. (The most natural ideological allies of the market function, conservatives, all committed themselves to the Republican Party’s totalistic opposition to every facet of the law.)A new Kaiser Health News analysis released this week finds:A surge in health insurer competition appears to be helping restrain premium increases in hundreds of counties next year, with prices dropping in many places where newcomers are offering the least expensive plans … In counties that are adding at least one insurer next year, premiums for the least expensive silver plan are rising 1 percent on average. Where the number of insurers is not changing, premiums are growing 7 percent on average.
4 New Studies: Obamacare Working Incredibly Well -- NYMag