Forecast: Overhaul to push health care tab higher

WASHINGTON - The nation's health care tab will go up - not down - as a result of President Barack Obama's sweeping overhaul.

That's the conclusion of a government forecast yesterday, which also predicts the increase will be modest.

The average annual growth in health care spending will be just two-tenths of 1 percentage point higher through 2019 with Obama's remake, said the analysis from Medicare's Office of the Actuary.

And that's with more than 32 million uninsured gaining coverage because of the new law.

"The impact is moderate," said Andrea Sisko, an economist with the nonpartisan unit that prepared the report.

Factoring in the law, Americans will spend an average of $13,652 per person a year on health care in 2019, according to the actuary's office. Without the law, the corresponding number would be $13,387, or $265 less.

The big picture numbers are $4.6 trillion with the overhaul in 2019, and $4.5 trillion without it. The nation will spend $2.6 trillion on health care this year.

The new bottom line is guaranteed to provide ammunition for both sides of the health care debate.

Republicans are vowing repeal if they win control of Congress this fall, although they are unlikely to have enough votes to override an Obama veto.

For critics, the numbers show that the law didn't solve the cost problem, although Obama repeatedly said he wanted to bend the spending curve down.

The analysis found that health care spending will grow to nearly 20 percent of the economy in 2019. That siphons off resources that could be invested in education, research, transportation or other areas. Medical costs now account for about 17 percent of the economy, and some experts think that's already too much.

"We really haven't trimmed health care spending," said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, which advocates for reducing the federal deficit. "Even if we found a way to provide more people with coverage, we still have the same fiscal problem we always did. Frankly, it's a little bit more difficult to solve now because we have made a major new commitment."