In reality, neither I nor anyone else knows for certain what caused this. Obamacare advocates have not been shy about awarding credit to the health care law for this sustained slowdown. As Council of Economic Advisors chairman Jason Furman put it bluntly nearly two years ago in the Wall Street Journal op-ed page: “ObamaCare Is Slowing Health Inflation.” Even as recently as last month he framed it “health care price inflation has been roughly in line with overall inflation since March 2010, whereas it exceeded overall inflation by an average of 1.7 percentage points per year over the preceding 50 years.”
However, when unconstrained by tight op-ed page word limits, even Mr. Furman is willing to concede: “Private-sector efforts appear to have had some success in slowing cost growth in private coverage even before the recession hit and the Affordable Care Act was enacted, and these efforts have continued to exert downward pressure in recent years.” He freely acknowledges: “The full list of structural factors that have contributed to recent trends will probably never be fully understood.”
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