One important goal of the Affordable Care Act was to address rising health care spending. Consult the free-access article “National Health Care Spending In 2016: Spending and Enrollment Growth Slow after Initial Coverage Expansions,” published in Health Affairs, at https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2017.1299. This article reports aggregate statistics on national health expenditure using data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

a. Consult Exhibit 1. What was the annual growth in national health expenditure in the years prior to and after the Affordable Care Act? In 2014–2015, immediately after the ACA’s main provisions came into effect, what were the areas with greatest growth in expenditure?

b. Consult Exhibit 2. For each category of insurance coverage in the exhibit (private insurance, Medicare, and Medicaid), what has happened in the years after the ACA to enrollment growth and per-enrollee expenditure growth?

c. Discuss how these tables shed light on the impact the ACA has had on overall growth in national health expenditure. How do your findings relate to the various cost-control measures introduced by the ACA that were discussed in the chapter?