Frequently I think about how a big goal of ACA was to "bend the cost curve." I don't bring this up to fight about ACA, but to point out that a primary goal of landmark once-a-generation health care legislation was to make the costs go up not quite as fast as they had been going up.
Yes there were other things, but the techno-wonkidudies kept putting up these charts and intoning, "THIS WILL BEND THE CURVE," as if letting rich thieves extract slightly less of our money than the absolutely insane growing amount they were projected to be able extract from us was some major triumph of Smart Legislating, instead of just an absolute capitulation to "stakeholders."
And it's actually even worse than that, because the promise was to lower aggregate costs, not out of pocket individual costs. And, well, you know...
We gotta do more than lower the first derivative a bit. With everything.
