Now they tell us

Bad news, although perhaps not surprising news, about health care reform this week. The first comprehensive study of the new law by neutral experts found that it will raise health care costs, not reduce them. National health care spending will jump by $311 billion between 2010 and 2019. And – surprise! surprise! – Congress isn’t likely to keep the enacted cuts to Medicare, which means those costs could go even higher. (Read an account here. Read another one here.)

This report comes from the Office of the Actuary, an independent agency within the Department of Health and Human Services.
The administration and other health reform apologists will note that $311 billion is less than 1 percent of the expected total health care spending during the decade, which is estimated at $35 trillion. They also would point to the study’s conclusion that health reform will indeed add 34 million people to insurance rolls.
But the No. 1 problem with health care in the United States is runaway costs. Bring that down and the coverage problem will take care of itself. Americans spend $2.5 trillion a year on health care, which works out to a per capita cost greater than in any other industrialized nation, including those with socialized medicine. And despite what many would like to believe, the level of health care here isn’t really better than in many of those other nations.
Democrats rammed health reform into law at great political peril, and yet the real problem won’t move an inch.