A NEW study just released by the Centres for Medicaid and Medicare Services, a government agency, suggests that the sweeping set of health reforms passed by Congress in March will not do much to cut costs over the next decade. In February, before passage of the reforms, those same boffins estimated that health costs would rise an average of 6.1% per year over the next decade. The new study, which takes the new laws into account, says the increase will be about 6.3% per year over that period.

This news has already sent pundits and politicians into a frenzy. Conservatives are gleefully proclaiming this study as validation for their view that ObamaCare was always going to add a mountain of red tape and subsidies that will make the health system more expensive. They point to a separate study released this week suggesting that health insurers are planning to raise premiums 1% to 9%, in response to the new regulations imposed by the reforms, as proof that this effort will only hurt the ordinary man.

For their part, Democrats are rushing to defend the law's magical cost-cutting powers that they claim the new study ignores, pointing to theoretical savings to come from a more efficient health system. Pointing to recent scandals involving Anthem Blue Cross in California and other insurers who used bogus actuarial techniques to try to justify massive rate hikes rates, they vow to use the power of state insurance regulators and new federal powers to demand justifications for those proposed rate increases.

Who's right? Both—and neither. Both are right in the following sense. Political claims made by the boosters of reform aside, ObamaCare was always chiefly about extending coverage, not tackling the demons driving cost. After all, it was modelled on the Massachusetts universal-care health reforms pushed through (then renounced) by then-governor Mitt Romney, a Republican presidential hopeful in 2012. The Bay State's reformers explicitly went for coverage even though they knew it would increase costs. Given that the new federal reform will spend hundreds of billions of dollars on new subsidies to help the uninsured get coverage, and given that it imposes new coverage requirements on insurers (such as the ban on discrimination against people with “pre-existing conditions”), it was always going to raise overall health costs.

Democrats may also be right, though only time will tell. It is possible that the enormous waste and inefficiency in the American health system can be checked by reforms. On this view, savings will eventually come from greater investments in preventive care, comparative effectiveness studies, realignment of incentives away from “fee for service” medicine and the elimination of the use of emergency rooms by the uninsured for routine care. Both because such savings may take more than a decade to materialise and because the Congressional Budget Office's influential scoring methodology does not account for such savings, it is probably fair to say that most official studies do not give sufficient weight to such possible cost savings.

However, both sides of this argument are wrong too—or at least disingenuous. To claim that the new study is in any way shocking, be that to praise it or to bury it, is simply ridiculous. ObamaCare focused on expanding coverage, not controlling costs, as most independent analysts argued all along. Indeed, Andrea Sisko, the lead author of this new study, acknowledged as much this week: “The overall net impact is moderate… the underlying impacts on coverage and financing are more pronounced.”

And of course this is something that readers of The Economist knew all along. The week that ObamaCare passed Congress in March, they were informed that “the reforms will expand coverage dramatically, but at a heavy cost to the taxpayer. They will also do far too little to rein in the underlying drivers of America's roaring health inflation. Analysis by RAND, an independent think-tank, suggests that the reforms will actually increase America's overall health spending—public plus private—by about 2% by 2020, in comparison with a scenario of no reform.”

That is why it is ridiculous to claim, from left or right, that the new report is shocking. It's not. However, it is the silly season before the mid-term elections when ridiculous claims are all too common. Punters are therefore advised to take any outraged statements made by politicians or political commentators with a heavy dose of salt.