The Money People Will Save From ACA Will That Be A Stimulant.....

[backscatter712]

28. There's also a lot of under-the-hood reforms that already are reducing costs...

Like the cap on the medical loss ratio, means that more of our insurance premiums are going to pay for medical care, and less for the CEO's 600 foot yacht.

Or the restructuring of Medicare payments from pay-per-procedure to pay-per-patient, meaning that there's less incentive for sleazy hospitals to run up the bill with zillions of expensive tests, and that hospitals will be more motivated to treat you correctly the first time so they don't have to pay for a re-admission.

Don't believe me? Believe the Nobel-prize winning economist...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/29/opinion/krugman-obamacares-secret-success.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20131129&_r=1&

Obamacare’s Secret Success
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: November 28, 2013 760 Comments

Much of the Beltway establishment scoffed at the promise of cost savings. The prevalent attitude in Washington is that reform isn’t real unless the little people suffer; serious savings are supposed to come from things like raising the Medicare age (which the Congressional Budget Office recently concluded would, in fact, hardly save any money) and throwing millions of Americans off Medicaid. True, a 2011 letter signed by hundreds of health and labor economists pointed out that “the Affordable Care Act contains essentially every cost-containment provision policy analysts have considered effective in reducing the rate of medical spending.” But such expert views were largely ignored.

So, how’s it going? The health exchanges are off to a famously rocky start, but many, though by no means all, of the cost-control measures have already kicked in. Has the curve been bent?

The answer, amazingly, is yes. In fact, the slowdown in health costs has been dramatic.

O.K., the obligatory caveats. First of all, we don’t know how long the good news will last. Health costs in the United States slowed dramatically in the 1990s (although not this dramatically), probably thanks to the rise of health maintenance organizations, but cost growth picked up again after 2000. Second, we don’t know for sure how much of the good news is because of the Affordable Care Act.