In a report released this month, the Senate Budget Committee has found that the Affordable Care Act will add $131 billion to the federal deficit over the next ten years. Even more striking is the fact that this $131 billion will not, in fact, expand growth in the healthcare system.
The most recent example of increased spending without result within the realm of Obamacare is the Accountable Care Organization, or ACO. ACO was enacted to join hospitals, primary care physicians, and specialists into teams in order to produce more efficient patient treatment. Health and Human Services released this new federal regulation with the intent to reduce spending. However, over the first two years of this experiment, spending increased at over half of the 32 HHS hand-selected sites that were used for the test model.
This is only one example of the ACA’s failed attempt to increase services and efficiency while decreasing spending. While the intentions of the Affordable Care Act are to make healthcare more affordable to Americans, the next decade will prove the opposite as Americans are faced with an increasing debt and a heavier tax burden that comes with a less-than-efficient national healthcare system.
When he first began to roll out his suffocating national healthcare program, President Obama and his fellow Democrats touted that Obamacare would give the American economy the boost it so desperately needed. While it is widely known that Obamacare has obliterated consumer choice, which is the driving force behind America’s free-market system, recent data shows that President Obama’s so-called boost to the economy has in fact produced the opposite effect.