Most people would consider it pretty bad luck if they had three inches of rain dumped on their city in a 24-hour period. That is, unless they had just missed being hit by a hurricane. That analogy captures how we should feel about Obamacare.
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This isn’t idle speculation. In 2009, President Obama’s first year in office, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services projected that health care spending would take up 19.3 percent of GDP in 2016. The most recent projections show health care costing 18.1 percent of GDP this year.
That sounds really nerdy, but the difference between these two projections amounts to more than $220 billion in savings this year. That comes to $690 per person in savings or $2,750 for an average family of four. This is real money to most people.
One reason that the slowing in health care costs is not widely recognized is that most people are not studying the projections. While just about everyone living in a coastal city will know about the forecast of a hurricane strike, few people spend their time studying health care cost projections. This means that when spending slows sharply, as it has in the last seven years, most people don’t recognize the slowdown. They just know that health care costs more than it used to. This is the case of people getting hit by three inches of rain and not recognizing that they just missed a hurricane...
