Emanuel: ‘Nobody Is Talking About Health Care Costs Going Down’

This post was filed from Doctors For America’s 2012 National Leadership Conference in Washington, D.C.

Zeke Emanuel — long caricatured by conservatives for supposedly supporting the rationing of care — assured a group of doctors attending Doctors For America’s annual conference on Monday morning that the health law would not control health care costs by rationing care. The law, he argued, will begin to change system incentives to encourage providers to deliver care more efficiently:

EMANUEL: We are spending $2.6 trillion…no one when we talk about cost control — no one, let me repeat, no one is talking about getting us from $2.6 to $2.7 trillion to $2 trillion. We’re talking about slowing the rate of growth. There is going to be plenty of resources in the system….Nobody is talking about health care costs going down. We’re talking about slowing the rate of growth. That’s what cost control is — control, not cost savings.

Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected in 2011 that between 2013 and 2021, “growth in spending will be restrained by reductions in updates to payment rates that were included in the 2010 health care legislation.”