GAO Report: Affordable Care Act Adds $6.2 Trillion to Long-Term Deficit

Assuming the law is enforced as-is, the U.S. deficit will decline 1.5 percent as a share of the economy over the next 75 years, according to the GAO. Auditors attributed 1.2 percent of this improvement to the Affordable Care Act.
Under a different set of assumptions, the law has the opposite effect over time, the GAO said -- the deficit will increase by 0.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) if the law's cost-containment measures are phased out.

Conservatives love to apply “cost-benefit analysis” to government programs—except in health care. In fact, working with drug companies and warning of “death panels,” they slipped language into Obamacare banning cost-effectiveness research. Here’s how that happened, and why it can’t stand.


...The stunning inefficiency of the U.S. health care system as a whole is now beyond dispute. To see the magnitude of aggregate waste, one only has to look at the gross disparities in how medicine is practiced in different parts of the country and with what results.


The best-known work in this area comes from the Dartmouth Atlas Project. For more than a decade, researchers there have systematically reviewed the medical records of deceased Medicare patients nationwide, including those who suffered from specific chronic conditions during their last two years of life. And by doing so, the researchers have uncovered striking anomalies that point to vast inefficiencies.


...Yet while we know the system as a whole is grossly inefficient, it remains easy for those responsible for the waste to escape detection, let alone accountability. The biggest single reason is that, due to the insistence of conservatives allied with drug manufacturers and medical device makers, the federal government is not allowed to consider the cost-effectiveness of different treatments in deciding how to invest health care dollars.

However, the federal budget remains on an unsustainable path.