I like Sarah Kliff's writing on health care, but she seems to leave out an obvious factor. The logic behind Obamacare was that it would slow the rising health care costs by imposing spending restraints in return for greater coverage.
Health care providers tended to overcharge people with insurance to cover those without insurance. This typically happened at hospitals, but that set the standard across the board for the rest of the health care industry. This is why an aspirin cost $5 when you had your appendix out.
So this sentence in the opening:
The federal government thinks we're entering a new era of slower-than-normal health care spending — even after Obamacare expands coverage to millions of Americans.
is somewhat misleading. It's not "even after" but "because".
As Diamond Joe Biden said, "This is a big, f-cking deal."
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