So not only did the Unaffordable Care Act not "bend the cost curve downward" - something only the free market and privatization can do - it's goosing it upward at an ever-dizzyingly-increasing rate.
Just as we said it would - because it couldn't do anything else:
Spending on health care will outpace the nation's overall economic growth over the next decade, the government forecast on Tuesday, underscoring a coming challenge for the next president, not to mention taxpayers, businesses and individual Americans.
To which the "solution" will, inevitably, be single-payer, universal Medicaid, and everybody knows it. Because privatization, which actually would solve all our healthcare problems, would be a fate worse than death.
A combination of expanded insurance coverage under Barack Obama's law....
The cause of our healthcare problems.
....an aging population....
Which death panels and state-mandated euthanasia will eventually "solve".
....and rising demand....
Thanks to ObamaCare.
....will be squeezing society's ability to pay.
Which was always the whole point of the UCA.
By 2019, midway through the next president's term....
Or the current one's.
....health care spending will be increasing at roughly 6% a year, compared to an average annual rise of 4% from 2008 through 2013....
Which is to say, market forces had been "bending the cost curve downward" until ObamaCare was foisted on us, after which the upward spiral resumed.
Even so, the report is "not great news," said economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a center-right think tank.
"The main point is that the bill will continue to grow faster than the economy, which is what pays the bill," he added.
And seeing as how the economy hasn't grown in over seven years and won't begin to resume doing so for at least another two or three years, Mr. Eakin is vastly understating the looming maelstrom.
"The next president faces the task of reining in the growth of federal entitlement spending."
Assuming there is a "next president". And if there is, he will not be president for long if he doesn't add brand new entitlement programs, much less try to even slow down the ones already on the books. Or if he does, come to think of it. But that would assume that the next president will be a Republican. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump wouldn't have to worry about such constrictions.
"I do think this becomes something of a liability for anybody coming into office, and they need to have a very proactive policy to address it," said Dan Mendelson, CEO of Avalere Health, a market analysis and consulting firm. Mendelson served in the Clinton White House as a health policy expert.
Which the voters will not want to hear and will angrily vilify any incoming POTUS who even hints at such a policy. Which is why no POTUS and no Congress ever does so or ever will. We can blast elected Republicans as "squishes" and "RINOs" and "sellouts" and whatever all we want, but that's the dynamic they're up against: You can't change public policy if you don't first get elected, and you can't stay in office if you try to change public policy. The Overton Window is just not that elastic. Ronald Reagan, for all his achievements and victories for the conservative cause, never took on Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid. Even Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, this site's choice for POTUS in 2016, the man who took on Big Labor and broke them and beat back three subsequent electoral attempts to topple him and was born for this task and confrontation, will only ever succeed in shaving a percentage point or two off of the entitlements monster's rate of spiraling increase. The task is just too enormous for one president even in two terms, something even Walk would be unlikely to secure.
You can see where this line of thought is headed, can't you? In order to resurrect the Constitution and the Old American Republic it begat, a trusted POTUS like Walker might need to be granted....emergency powers to get done what must be done. Because what must be done - privatizing all entitlements programs immediately - cannot be done any other way.
Don't bother with the angry incredulity in the comments, I know all the objections to what I'm saying. I agree with them. And it'd never happen in any case. But you've got to understand how late in the game we are. We're staring down the barrel of a quarter of a QUADRILLION dollars in unfunded entitlements liabilities. Roughly a decade and a half of GDP at actual current rates. Does anybody believe that will ever be paid off? And when it's not, that means.....national default. And, to express it in astronomical terms, if Greece's default was a solar flare, ours will be a quasar. And nobody will bail us out, because nobody will be able to even if they were so inclined.
In other words, we're broke. It's just a question of when the phantom "prosperity" overhang effect wears off and we collapse like the World Trade Center towers....
It'll be that sudden, and incomprehensibly more vast.
And the other thing we can absolutely count on? It'll somehow be the Republicans' fault, and both Democrats and Tea Partiers will agree on that misassessment.
Because even after America is destroyed, some things will never change.
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