HEALTHCARE SPENDING WILL BE $2.6 TRILLION LESS THAN ESTIMATED

Health spending in the U.S. appears to be dramatically lower than analysts had projected immediately after passage of the Affordable Care Act, a new analysis suggests. The new projections indicate that the U.S. will spend approximately $2.6 trillion less on health care in the five-year period ending in 2019 than estimated, despite a brief spike in health spending in 2014, the authors say. "Obviously the people [who made the initial estimates] were wrong by 2.6 trillion dollars," Gary Claxton, vice-president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-profit health policy institute, said Wednesday. "The interesting thing is that, over the last couple of years, we managed to greatly increase the number of people with access to care and increase their benefits and still maintain low rates of growth," Claxton says. "The question is how long these low growth rates will go on." Health spending slowed in Medicare, Medicaid and private health insurance. Analysts at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid have predicted that spending will be $455 billion lower than expected. Medicaid spending, they now say, will be $1.05 billion lower than predicted. Even spending for private health insurance was $664 billion lower than the government's forecast.