Has Obamacare Fixed U.S. Healthcare Inflation?
Here we go again. What is it about Obamacare that inspires its fiercest supporters the cherry-pick evidence as proof it is “working”? The latest entrant in this never-ending contest is Matt Phillips, who trumpets the news “Obamacare fixed U.S. healthcare inflation.” If true, this would be no mean feat since as we’ll see, medical inflation has outpaced general inflation rather regularly over the past half century, sometimes by as much as 6 percentage points in a single year. But as we’ll also see, giving Obamacare credit for the recent slowdown in health prices is quite a stretch for two reasons: first, it fails to account for the fact that this downward trend was clearly visible years before President Obama was even elected president; and second, it fails to account for what was happening to the general economy and general inflation during the same time period.
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