DailyKOS Joan Carter wrote a really good article on the state of Obamacare. It turns out Obamacare had a hell of a week.
She writes:
Thanks in part to some of the Medicare provider reforms and incentives in the law, healthcare spending in the U.S. grew slower in 2013 than it had in 53 years. Half a century. Lowest healthcare spending growth. It’s worth repeating that the shrinking of Medicare spending hasalready cut the deficit more than any of the austerity-minded plans that anyone has come up with—Simpson/Bowles, or Paul Ryan, or anyone else.
There’s this, too: 50,000 lives saved because hospitals have been made safer. The law included both penalties and incentives for hospitals to reduce readmissions and thus to cut down on the incidence of things like patient falls, poor sanitation practices that increased hospital-based infections, or patients being given the wrong prescriptions. This is all critical in saving lives, but incidentally helped in that whole spending less money on health care part, particularly for Medicare.
Finally, the good folks at the Kaiser Family Foundation released the results of their research into state marketplaces. They found that premiums under Obamacare are being held largely in check for 2015 thanks to the fact that lots of insurers have decided to join in, and are creating competition. As the law intended. That doesn’t mean that health insurance premiums aren’t still too high for a lot of people, particularly people whose wages aren’t keeping up with the growth in healthcare inflation, but it is helping.
Why is this information not covered with the same urgency and delight by the corporate traditional mainstream media? If the media were Liberal as some purport that it is, this week would have been plastered with all of this good news.
The only potential problem on the horizon is the current Supreme Court case that could gut subsidies in states that did not create their own exchanges. Republicans better tread lightly. The reality is that if Americans begin losing their subsidies and with that insurance, blame will be directed directly at Republicans. They will indeed pay a price for that.