Yesterday, Federal health care actuaries released their annual “National Health Expenditure Projections” report showing how Obama and his signature domestic achievement – ObamaCare – has failed to rein in health care spending and will pass the problem along to the next administration.
According to the report, spending on health care will grow a projected 5.8 percent from 2015 to 2025, growing at a rate faster than the economy and swallowing up 20.1 percent of GDP in 2025. For the first time, health care spending per person has shot up an average of $10,345 per person. The government will be on the hook for 47 percent of health care expenditures in 2025 and out-of-pocket spending for ordinary citizens will increase from $338 billion to $556 billion the same year.
Bending the health care cost curve was a fundamental goal of ObamaCare and according to the report, the law has failed to live up to its promise. In fact, the law pushed health care costs up. ObamaCare’s coverage provisions accelerated spending by 2.4 percent, from 2.9 percent in 2013 to 5.3 percent in 2014. Medicaid spending per beneficiary, which ObamaCare expanded and insurance spending on insured policyholders will balloon by 2025.
By 2025, the report says, Medicaid, a program for lower-income people, is expected to spend an average of nearly $12,500 a year for each beneficiary, up from about $8,000 in 2015, and spending by private insurers is expected to average almost $8,600 for each person covered. Private insurers spent $5,400 per insured last year.
Forecasting the years ahead ObamaCare will continue to be partly responsible for the spending increase:
[ObamaCare’s] coverage expansions are anticipated to continue influencing health spending growth during the first two years of the 2015–25 projection period.
As health care spending continues to challenge the purse strings of the government, employers and citizens, now is the wrong time to embrace the far-left’s dream of enacting an unaffordable public option backed by President Obama, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.