Real Health Care Reform, Wal-Mart Style

[Geee]

Investors Business Daily:

Health Costs: The administration is celebrating the slowdown in health spending as evidence ObamaCare is working. But the slowdown is largely the result of private-sector reforms — which ObamaCare undermines.

 

According to data released this week from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, national health spending grew just 3.7% in 2012, marking the fourth straight year that growth has been less than 4%, and the first time in decades that health spending grew more slowly than the GDP.

 

Naturally, the White House desperately wants to claim credit for this. A blog post on its website claimed that "the Affordable Care Act, for the first time in decades, has helped to stop (the) trend" of skyrocketing health costs.

 

But as the nearby chart shows, national health spending growth rates started to decelerate long before ObamaCare. Even the government's own data-crunchers say ObamaCare has "had a minimal impact on aggregate health spending." They attribute the slowdown instead to the lousy economic recovery and lower drug costs.