Larry Samuelson of Yale agreed that health-care spending would slow down: “Health insurance should provide care more efficiently than the current lack of insurance coupled with reliance on emergency services.”
Richard Schmalensee of MIT, by contrast, disagreed: “A big switch from reliance on emergency rooms to prevention could do this, but this does not seem likely.”
And David Cutler of Harvard was uncertain: “The timing is really important here. Long term can be very different from short term; costs more likely to fall in the long term.”