US marks 4 straight years of slowing health costs

[DonViejo]

Source: ASSOCIATED PRESS

RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR, ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) — Even as his health care law divided the nation, President Barack Obama’s first term produced historically low growth in health costs, government experts said in a new report Monday.

While the White House sees hard-won vindication, it’s too early to say if the four-year trend that continued through 2012 is a lasting turnaround that Obama can claim as part of his legacy.

For the second year in a row, the U.S. economy grew faster in 2012 than did national health care spending, according to nonpartisan economic experts at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

That’s an important statistic. In most years, health care spending grows more rapidly than the economy, like bills that rise faster than your paycheck. That cost pressure steadily undermines employer insurance as well as government programs like Medicare and Medicaid. But the pattern slowed starting in 2009, and then appears to have reversed ever so slightly and tenuously in 2012.

Read more: http://www.salon.com/2014/01/06/us_marks_4_straight_years_of_slowing_health_costs/

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[Stuart G]

1. Good News, and I think there will be much more in the next few years...K and R..nt

[Fred Sanders]

2. Obamacare is working to do what it promised to do and the mass media is too in love with crisis...

and infotainment news to dare report something so simple as what those two simple squiggly lines explain so clearly.

[Drew2510]

5. I sincerly hope you are right, but it's way too soon to tell

if there is a relationship between the slowing of cost increases and the ADA as the costs increases slowing were occurring much earlier. If I had to make a guess at this point I would guess that the slowing of cost is related to an agonizingly slow economy recovery and high long term unemployment. We must remember that the ACA is operating in a open market environment and as demand for health care will assuredly increase, under the ACA, the supply of health care will not be able to keep pace and may decrease. Then we will get some significant inflation in health care costs.

[tofuandbeer]

3. Ah!

So this is why the Association of American Physicians & Surgeons, Inc. and the Alliance for Natural Health USA were pleading Chief Justice John Roberts to halt ACA.

[sinkingfeeling]

4. This will NOT be a lead story on network news programs.