A not very happy birthday

The Economist
March 17, 2011

As for costs, Mr Obama’s reforms deserve praise for expanding coverage, but they do this by adding millions of people to an unsupportably expensive system. Analysts estimate that America’s health spending will continue to soar under the reforms. That is a point hotly contested by Mr Obama’s team, who usually point to theoretical future efficiency gains and innovations that will save pots of money.

So it came as a shock when Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts and one of Mr Obama’s closest friends, took a different tack. Asked recently about the pioneering health reforms in his state, which served as a model for the national reforms, he first gave a backhanded compliment to Mitt Romney. Mr Patrick then revealed the dirty little secret of Obamacare: “What these folks did in Massachusetts is frankly the same thing that the Congress did, which is to take on access first, and come to cost-control next.” In other words, America will soon have no choice but to come to grips with costs. Whatever one thinks of Mr Obama’s reforms, there is no denying that they have brought that day of reckoning closer.

http://www.economist.com/node/18389179?story_id=18389179

The Economist joins the chorus of those who say that “America’s health spending will continue to soar under the reforms.” Many have contended that it was a mistake to have expanded coverage without first controlling costs. The real mistake was not in reversing the order of coverage expansion and cost containment, rather it was in the failure to do both simultaneously through the adoption of a national single payer program.