The Trump gang, who invented pet-eating immigrants to help win the election, are also inventing crazy stories about Obamacare wrecking the health care system. To be clear, we have huge problems with our healthcare system.

We pay over $700 billion for drugs and other pharmaceutical products that would cost us around $150 billion in a free market. Our doctors get paid twice as much as doctors in other wealthy countries. And we throw away hundreds of billions of dollars on private insurers, which could be saved if we had a universal Medicare-type system.

But none of these problems originated with Obamacare. As a result of Obamacare, millions of people got insurance who could not otherwise afford it. Also, tens of millions of people now know that if they lose a job that provides insurance, they can still get reasonably affordable insurance on the Obamacare exchanges. That was not true before Obamacare passed, especially if a worker or someone in their family had a serious health condition.

So, Obamacare is a really big deal, even if we need to go much further in both ensuring access and getting costs down. But one aspect of Obamacare that is seriously underappreciated is that healthcare cost growth slowed sharply after it was passed. Here’s the picture.¹

In the decade before Obamacare passed, healthcare costs increased 4.0 percentage points as a share of GDP. The equivalent of more than $1.2 trillion in today’s economy. By contrast, in the 15 years since its passage, health care costs have increased by just 1.4 percentage points.

The slowdown in healthcare cost growth was largely unpredicted. Both the Congressional Budget Office and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services had predicted that the prior health care cost growth path would continue.

Clearly Obamacare was not solely responsible for slower cost growth. There was a slowdown in cost growth in other countries as well. Also, the slowing began before most of the provisions of the Affordable Care Act took effect.

But there can be zero doubt that if cost growth had accelerated, even if it was for reasons that had nothing to do with Obamacare, the Democrats would get the blame for it. This means they get credit for the slowing of cost growth even if they were not entirely responsible for it.

In any case, cost growth did slow, which means that Republicans are lying when they say they got handed a broken healthcare system when Trump took office. Remember, Republicans are the people that gave us pet-eating migrants. This is just another lie from them.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

The post Health Care Cost Growth Slowed Sharply After Obamacare appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.