Of all the surrenders to corporate power health care has got to rank right up at the top of the list. Obamacare’s failures come down to an unwillingness to consign the insurance industry to the trash heap of history and a deal which guaranteed the drug companies billions of dollars in profits. Which makes the news about slowing health care costs even more infuriating.

Here:

One of the economic mysteries of the last few years has been the bigger-than-expected slowdown in health spending, a trend that promises to bolster wages and help close the wide federal deficit over the long term — but only if it persists.

Major new studies from researchers at Harvard University, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and elsewhere have concurred that at least some of the slowdown is unrelated to the recession, and might persist as the economy recovers. David M. Cutler, the Harvard health economist and former Obama adviser, estimate that, given the dynamics of the slowdown, economists might be overestimating public health spending over the next decade by as much as $770 billion. [emphasis added]

The truth is that a chunk of this is attributable to the collapse of the middle class: people can’t afford the rising out-of-pocket expenses or they are unemployed, either reason resulting in the dropping of health insurance by millions of people.

Some of the slowdown, though, does comes from other changes in how the industry is structured.

But, the tragedy is that the entire health care cost issue would have been a non-factor had single-payer, Medicare for All been adopted.