The Health-Cost Lie

Here's the ObozoLie:

Then there’s the problem of rising cost....insurance premiums have gone up three times faster than wages....our health care system is placing an unsustainable burden on taxpayers.  When health care costs grow at the rate they have, it puts greater pressure on programs like Medicare and Medicaid. If we do nothing to slow these skyrocketing costs, we will eventually be spending more on Medicare and Medicaid than every other government program combined....

Now, these are the facts. Nobody disputes them. 

And here's the truth:

...A January 2012 article in the journal Health Affairs reported that “U.S. health spending grew more slowly in 2009 and 2010—at rates of 3.8 percent and 3.9 percent, respectively—than in any other years during the fifty-one-year history of the National Health Expenditure Accounts.” That article, by economists and statisticians who work for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, says, rather than controlling costs, ObamaCare actually increased health spending by one or two tenths of a percentage point in 2010. Overall, though, the law’s effect in 2010 was less important than were things like “the loss of patent protection for certain brand-name drugs” and “a continuing increase in the use of generic medications,” i.e., those $4 generics at Walmart.

That's not news to one well-connected figure.

The man who was President Obama’s White House budget director, Peter Orszag, weighed in last week from his new perch in the private sector with a column acknowledging that “The rising cost of health care in the U.S. has been slowing over the past few years.”

“Slowing,” not “skyrocketing,” got that? Now he tells us.

Horse.  Barn.  Lying Sack of S*&t.