Jared Bernstein

You're so right.

I mean, I'll push back a little bit on some of the things you said, but broadly speaking, you're exactly right.

And I actually, I think like you, when Republicans were saying during the shutdown debate about

you know, giving, you know, tens of billions of dollars to, in these premium tax credits to people so that they could buy, so that their premiums in the Affordable Care Act exchanges don't double.

Republicans go, well, that's just throwing good money after bad.

And I don't disagree with that.

However, if you don't do it, those premiums are going to double.

So here's where I want to push back a little bit.

The Affordable Care Act did more to control healthcare spending than your rap a second ago would have you think.

Now, if it solved the problem, we wouldn't be having this conversation forever.

Far from solve the problem.

But it did institute a number of things that led especially Medicare costs to grow considerably more slowly, which actually has helped us in the fiscal front.

Some of those things and almost all of those had to do with controlling costs.

The problem is that there are relative to all these other economies that spend half of what we do on health care as a share of the economy.

We have very few cost controls.

The ones that we do have actually work, giving Medicare the ability to negotiate for lower drug prices.

That's worked.

But there's 15 drugs on that formulary and you need to have hundreds.

Yeah.

restricting the profitability of insurance companies if they're not using enough of their profits to pay out.