Did they really think nobody would check the CMS report to see if their claims about Obamacare were accurate?

Via The Hill:

The White House on Monday said ObamaCare was partly responsible for slowing the growth of healthcare spending, even while the agency tasked with implementing the law said the impact was “minimal.”

“For years, healthcare costs in America skyrocketed, with brutal consequences for our country,” President Obama’s healthcare adviser Jeanne Lambrew wrote in a blog post.

“The Affordable Care Act, for the first time in decades, has helped to stop that trend,” she said.

The White House claim came Monday afternoon in conjunction with a report issued by the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) that found healthcare spending over the last four years has grown at the slowest pace ever recorded.

Healthcare spending in the U.S. grew at 3.7 percent in 2012 to $2.8 trillion, the CMS found. That’s in line with the previous three years of growth, which came in between 3.6 and 3.8 percent annually.

“This means that growth during all four years has occurred at the slowest rates ever recorded in the fifty-three-year history of the National Health Expenditure Accounts,” the CMS said in the report.

The report found that the healthcare portion of the economy fell from 17.3 percent to 17.2 percent from 2011 to 2012, as healthcare spending grew slower than gross domestic product.

However, the CMS report said the Affordable Care Act had only a “minimal impact” on the slower growth rate, and attributed the bulk of the decline to the economic downturn.

“The low rates of national health spending growth and relative stability since 2009 primarily reflect the lagged impacts of the recent severe economic recession,” said Anne B. Martin, an economist in the Office of the Actuary at CMS and lead author of the report.