The table below calculates the estimated coverage cost of ObamaCare as a share of projected national health spending from now until 2020.

Oops! In the year 2020, ObamaCare is expected to cost $234 billion – roughly 5.04% of all health spending, with an average cost running at 3.49% per year between now and then. The bottom line: in full flower, ObamaCare is an artfully diffused redistribution of health care funding costing barely 1/20^th the size of the entire non-system it is supposedly taking over.

The rest of ObamaCare – the 906 pages of the actual law, not the 2,400 or 2,700 pages of draft bills, as erroneously reported and re-reported in the general media – is window-dressing.  Yes, it includes some big, expensive, controversial make-work projects for the health care technocracy, some of which are long overdue, some of which will be dangerous, but most of which will merely add to the current cacophony of conflicting medical evidence on everything from cholesterol management to hormone replacement therapy.  But after the Supreme Court is done pretending not to factor in the intensely political nature of their task this week and rules on the constitutionality of the mandate, life will go on precisely as it always has for what will be, by 2020, nearly a $5 trillion per year colossus, unchanged at its foundations.

As with the bitterly debated Medicare drug benefit in 2004, ObamaCare is merely expanding the exact same things we have today for most Americans, to include all Americans, almost. The plan spreads the economic pain around the system fairly evenly, via taxes and fees that will show up in new equilibrium prices for insurance, drugs, and devices. And the economics of finally putting almost everyone into the system – instead of waiting until they are on death’s door, a.k.a., the door to the emergency room  – will offset some, most, all or none (depending on where you stand politically) of the upfront costs of getting them there. Anyone who says they know for sure how these systemic economic effects will play out is deluding himself and/or attempting to delude all of us, and is beating a political, not an economic drum.

Entropy Rules

How the Medicare drug benefit has played out in the past eight years is the only precedent we have for what will happen if/when ObamaCare is implemented. When that program was debated in Congress, critics on the right screamed on cue about “government bureaucrats” in our medicine cabinets, an entitlement that will bankrupt the country, etc., while critics on the left carped about the evils of capitalism, the program’s outrageous use of money-making corporations to deliver products to people, etc.. Out of this political sausage-grinder came a classically American public health care program of government funding and corporate delivery, a “modernization” truly consistent with the essence of the Medicare program.

With that modernization, the insurers, PBMs and specialty drug plans that administer the new drug benefit – and the drug companies that supply it – did not get everything they wanted; but they got enough to stay in business, make some money, and deliver long needed drug care to millions of people who previously could not afford it.  The Medicare drug benefit may be working no more perfectly than anything else in health care, but it is working just fine for millions of Americans who had too often been forced to choose between medicine and food, between certain death and slow starvation.  Maybe that’s why so few on the right or the left have brought it up in the debate: its embodiment of both political compromise and programmatic success constitute enough actual empirical evidence to sully anyone’s ideological certitude.

Indeed, the Medicare drug benefit may be a perfect trial run for ObamaCare.  It too wasn’t really a health “reform” plan – you know, where the whole payment system changes radically so that teams of doctors, hospitals and other providers are paid to keep us healthy and minimize the effects of disease, rather than ignore us until we are sick and then maximize the use of interventions.  Such true reform would apparently require an Act of God, not just an Act of Congress. But if you are running a health care organization and worrying about the impact of ObamaCare, take note of what happened to those involved with the Medicare drug benefit: a few organizations failed miserably, some have profited mightily, and most have muddled through, figured out the rules of the new game, and are doing just fine.

Such will be the fate of hospitals and physician groups, as they scramble to build the “accountable care organizations” they should have built a decade and a half ago, when managed care was attempting the same sort of payment reforms included, barely, on the margins of ObamaCare.  Better to build these organizations to first-mover advantage for new, quality-driven contracting with insurers and employers – who want precisely this kind of true reform and who are not going anywhere anytime soon.

In the meanwhile, the US health care system will continue on its long march of three steps forward two steps back, bracing for that monster storm that never gets here.  A politically and legally embattled “health care reform” plan that reforms almost nothing fundamental about health care will likely prove to be the troubled, underachieving child of American democracy’s rapidly deteriorating marriage. A third of this country thinks health care is a basic human right and the government should finance the whole shebang; another third thinks health care is a market good that should be earned, with the government banished from sight; a middle third does not know what it thinks, only what it fears, based on the latest anecdote about Medicare fraud, insurance company abuse, government incompetence, or medical private profiteering in their local news cycle.  If nothing else, ObamaCare has proven to be a dark mirror on our most deeply embedded cultural conflicts, from the death panel freakshows to the neanderthal discussion on birth control.

The only constant in health care is indeed gnawing anxiety about change that never actually occurs. This is true most of the time, for most of the health care non-system, which is ruled less by either government or markets than it is by entropy. When real change does occur in health care, it does so one private business contract at a time – with six months’ of meetings worth of notice – not via any grand re-engineering from Washington.

J.D. Kleinke is a Resident Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. He has been instrumental in the creation of four health care information organizations; served as a health care business columnist for the Wall Street Journal; advised both sides of the political aisle on pragmatic approaches to health policy and legislation; and authored three books about health care and medicine. His latest book is Catching Babies, a novel about the training of obstetrician/gynecologists.