One More Reason To Feel (Pretty) Good About Obamacare:Bill a lot smaller

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Millions of additional people now have health insurance thanks to the Affordable Care Act and the historic expansion of coverage it has made possible. But the nation’s total spending on medical care hasn’t exploded, as legions of “Obamacare” critics predicted it would.

In fact, America’s health care bill is turning out to be a lot smaller than economists thought it would be by this point.

That’s the conclusion of a new paper by John Holahan and Stacey McMorrow, researchers at the non-partisan Urban Institute. The aim of the paper is to tally up all the expenditures the country will make on health care between 2014 and 2019, whether it’s through private insurance, government programs like Medicare and Medicaid or direct out-of-pocket payments from patients to doctors.

(snip)
In 2010, just after the health care law passed, the government’s official actuaries at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services predicted that total national health spending for the five-year period starting in 2014 would be $23.6 trillion. Using the latest data, Holahan and McMorrow have calculated that spending over that interval will probably be $21 trillion -- in other words, the total will be $2.6 trillion less than the government's number crunchers thought it would be.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/10/health-care-costs_n_7040230.html