Obamacare Bends the Cost Curve Up: Here Is How to Bend It Down

Kathryn Nix / February 19, 2010

President Obama often says that bending the curve in health spending downward is one of the main objectives of his health care reform agenda. There is indeed a consensus that health costs are growing at a rapid rate, and that reformers should work to slow the rising tide of spending.

But as Heritage’s Robert A. Book, Ph.D, and Jason D. Fodeman, M.D. point out, the big picture is not so simple. In order to successfully reduce health care spending, legislators must address what is causing expenses to rise in the first place. The big House and Senate bills are based on faulty assumptions.

According to Book and Fodeman, “The House and Senate bills appear to be based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the basic factors driving health care spending upward. As a result, instead of restraining these basic factors, the bills neglect some and reinforce others, driving spending upwards instead of downward.”

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