The Affordable Care Act gets
less disastrous every day. The latest boost: Overall costs are now
likely to be $14 billion per year lower than estimated just two months
ago, and $56 billion per year cheaper than the first official estimate
in 2010. That's a 30% reduction, compared with the 2010 numbers.
The Congressional Budget Office
regularly updates its cost projections for all big federal programs, and
its latest numbers show an improvement related to Obamacare, as the ACA
is known, that few supporters or critics saw coming. In 2010, the year
Congress passed the law, the CBO said the annual cost of administering
the law and providing subsidies to enrollees to help them purchase
insurance would be about $172 billion in 2019, when all the provisions
of the law are fully in effect. In January of this year, CBO dropped its 2019 estimate to $135 billion per year. It has now dropped that even lower, to $121 billion per year. This chart shows the changes:
The agency cites two primary
reasons for the sharp decline. The chief reason is the drop in overall
healthcare costs — which is good news for everybody who pays for
healthcare, whether enrolled in Obamacare or not. From 1998 to 2005, the
growth in health insurance spending per enrollee was 5% per year, after
accounting for inflation. Those are private-sector numbers CBO used in
2010, when estimating future costs for Obamacare. But from 2006 to 2013,
such spending rose by just 1.8% per year — a slowdown that surprised
most healthcare economists. Factoring those lower annual increases into
the CBO’s forecasting model led to the lower projections for future
costs.
By: Rick Newman.
Review: Emerging Market Formulations &Research Unit, Flagship Records.
For The #FacebookTeam