"But we can imagine what the world would be like if the new law were already in place. One way is to go back through the data, and figure out what would have happened over the last decade if the Affordable Care Act, or something like it, had been in place. Steven Hill, a senior economist at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, did just that. And he's published his findings in Health Affairs:"
If adults who had individual insurance during 2001–08 had instead had benefits similar to those under the Affordable Care Act, their average annual out-of-pocket spending on medical care and drugs might have been $280 less. The near-elderly and people with low incomes might have saved $589 and $535, respectively. An important improvement would have been the reduced probability of incurring very high out-of-pocket spending. The likelihood of having out-of-pocket expenditures on care exceeding $6,000 would have been reduced for all adults with individual insurance, and the likelihood of having expenditures exceeding $4,000 would have been reduced for many.This part is also good: "The usual rap on the Massachusetts health reforms is that they haven’t controlled medical costs. And it’s true: Romneycare hasn’t slowed the growth in health care spending. But that was never its goal. The idea was to expand coverage and then, hopefully, address costs later. This is precisely what the state is doing right now: Lawmakers and stakeholders are hammering out a law that, they hope, will blaze a trail for cost containment just as the previous reforms blazed a trail for coverage expansion. (For more on these efforts, see this great primer from Sarah Kliff of the Washington Post.)"
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