What is cutting health care costs? These Harvard economists have no clue.

Bloomberg cites the most recent study:

The changes include greater use of generic drugs, higher out-of-pocket costs and more efficient care, a trend encouraged by the 2010 health-care overhaul, said David Cutler, a Harvard University health economist. If they permanently slow growth, the U.S. may reap $770 billion in unexpected savings from projected expenditures by 2021, wiping out a fifth of the budget deficit, one of the studies found.

Good, we have an evidence bearing Harvard Economist on the job.

The research, published yesterday in the journal Health Affairs, suggest that while the recession accounted for almost 40 percent of the decline, hitting those who can’t afford care, other factors also were at work. The analysis will be part of the debate between President Barack Obama and Republicans over how to control spending growth for Medicare and Medicaid.

OK, now we have the Obamacare savings in the other factors.

While neither study calculated a direct effect from the 2010 Affordable Care Act, Cutler, a former Obama adviser, said in a telephone interview that its influence is “gathering steam over time. It’s not a coincidence these things are happening at the very same time that policies are starting to penalize re-admissions, infections and things like that.”

Steam gathering, an essential statistical technique.

“I don’t want to downplay the importance of the recession,” said Michael Chernew, a professor of health-care policy at Harvard Medical School in Boston who also was an author of the study. “But even if you get rid of at least the direct effect of the recession, there was really something else going on.” The indirect effect is harder to gauge, he said. While large firms maintained health insurance for their employees, the recession may have pressured them to work harder at holding down spending growth, he said.

Ah yes, the indirect effect from the normative behavior of steam gatherers.

The paper calculates that the recession accounted for about 37 percent of the slowdown in health costs from 2003 to 2011. Declining private insurance coverage and cuts in payments by Medicare, (USBOMDCR)the government health plan for the elderly and disabled, accounted for another 8 percent and the remaining 55 percent is “unexplained,” Cutler wrote. That’s where the structural changes come in, he said.

Now we see that the mostly defined thing is cuts to Medicare payments. The rest is handwaving. What we have are a bunch of yoyos at Harvard trying to lie about the facts. They leave us with an astounding fact, if government pays less for something, they get less of it.