January 15, 2017
Folks looking at the NYT charts comparing the nation’s performance by various measures under President Bush and President Obama may be misled by the health care chart. The chart shows health care spending as a share of GDP rising from 14.0 percent in 2001 to 16.3 percent in 2008, which it describes as the “Bush years.” It shows a further increase to 18.1 percent in 2016, which are the “Obama years.” By this measure we see a modest slowing of health care cost growth as a share of GDP, with a rise of 2.3 percentage points in the Bush years compared with 1.8 percentage points in the Obama years.
The problem here is that the chart puts the end of the Bush years at 2008. Note that the start of the Bush years in 2001, which is of course when he actually took office. If we go out eight years, that puts us at 2009. In that year health care costs were 17.3 percent of GDP. Using this as an endpoint, costs grew by 3.3 percentage points of GDP in the eight years of the Bush administration. They grew by just 0.8 percentage points in the first seven years of the Obama administration. We will need data for 2017 before we can draw the full picture, but we will almost certainly still see a sharp slowing of health care costs under President Obama. Of course, we can argue about the extent to which the Obama administration deserves credit for this slowing of cost growth, but the fact it took place is not disputable.
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