Yesterday the Wall Street Journal posted an article detailing how much healthcare costs have risen in America during the decade of 2000 to 2010.

The article reports:

New data show that health spending over the past several years has been normalizing toward the rate of general inflation, rather than growing higher and higher, as had been the case almost continuously since the 1970s. This moderation in the growth rate of spending predates the national recession. And it puts the lie to the claim that we need government to put the brakes on an “out-of-control” health-care system.

As the graph nearby shows, the growth rate of national health expenditures, according to data compiled by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, has been moderating since 2002.

The chart shows that all of the hype about runaway healthcare costs was simply political hype.

J. D. Kleinke, who wrote the article, has the solution for fixing healthcare in America:

But we know that this slow, steady moderation in health-care spending is good news. True, it is not fast enough. But the decade-long trendline shows the way toward good policy for the future. If we really want to tame the health-care cost beast and make insurance “affordable,” we would double down on all of the positive developments.

We would liberate people with their own money from layer upon layer of arcane, localized insurance rules. We would fix the tax code to uncouple health insurance from employment and let people purchase their own mix of services and coverage. And we would let them do so in a competitive, national market just like with auto insurance—instead of holding them hostage in fragmented, local markets while shaking down their employers to subsidize a system that wants desperately to change itself.

The bottom line here is simple–people do a better job of spending their own money than the government does. Taking the government bureaucracy out of healthcare will make it more available and less expensive for everyone.