Remember all the pundits who stroked their chins, pretended to deliberate, then — completely predictably — came out against health care reform because, they said, it wouldn’t control health care costs? Remember all the demands that Obama do something real, like raising the Medicare age (which turns out not to make any significant difference to the deficit)?

Now, from the CEA, we have this:

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The CEA is careful not to claim too much — there’s pretty good evidence that the ACA has played an important role in the cost slowdown, but they don’t assign any particular number. Still, it looks as if the biggest complaint against Obamacare was completely wrong: cost control is one of the things that is really, really working, with huge positive fiscal implications.

If they get the enrollment process working — it’s getting better, but we still don’t know if it’s moving fast enough — this is still going to go down in the long run as a policy triumph.