>>> pretty shot of washington, d.c. very nice. capitol hill . with us now, the ceo of athena health. also with us, economic policy reporter for the "new york times," annie lowry. she wrote about the recent economic phenomenon and writes this. one of the economic mysteries has been the bigger than expected slowdown in health spending . a trend that promises to help close the wide federal deficit over the long-term. but only if it persists. while economists have cheered the flattening, families have assumed more and more of the health care burden, even if households benefit in the long-term, they might suffer in the long-term as their out of pocket health costs rise at a painful economic time to begin with. it is a painful economic time for most people even though the indicators show an upturn in so many ways. for the very rich.

>> yeah.

>> obama care obviously and the middle of the big debate, it still continues day in and day out. what's the future look like?

>> well, when you put that many sort of centrally administered little hooks and twists into anything of that scale, you're going to have a huge number of unintended consequences. some will be good and some bad.

>> which democrats very concerned right now, that kathleen sebelius may not be able to respond quickly. she has to respond quickly.

>> yeah. the basic problem right is you have an access problem that was driving the democrats. i got to get everybody something. this is 40 million people. too late. the market didn't work. we're stepping in and we're going to push everybody on to something. the other side of the argument is now you're going to forbid it from becoming affordable. you've boxed it in so you can't do a lot of things. so health plans aren't allowed offer to discount packaging. you can't have a no frills hmo. it's illegal not to have unlimited stage four cancer care in your package even though you cost it 25% more than not. that is the constriction that's going to make it harder for market forces to get in there and make it more affordable, but if the gravitational pull remains strong, if people remain feeling this is too much money and people somehow remotely are paying for it or can keep in mind they're paying for it, the entrepreneurial energy can still pull there. there are still things you can do to make it cheaper.

>> and annie, you obviously wrote an article talking about health care costs going down independent of the president's health care plan. i mean, people can obviously take credit for that, but for some reason a couple of years ago, it started to tick down about 2%. does that continue even after the recovery?

>> yeah, so there's a lot of evidence this happened independent of the health care law and of the really, really deep recession. so, the recession slowed the growth of health care cost, it's obviously a lot of people lost their insurance. they were very, very strapped economically, so they didn't want to spend a lot on procedures that were kind of on the line. but on top of that, you had slow growth because of changes in the medicare and medicaid programs and it looks like there are some things hospitals are administrating themselves to slow costs down.

>> i think she was right in that article, that we don't know, but there is this split. that the biggest phenomenon that happened during the slowdown is people who were insured, but at work when people are getting cut, didn't want to take time off to go get that hip or knee done because they wanted to be out on the floor. i'm killing it here, boss, when we're deciding how to meet our numbers.

>> how much do you think we could save if more doctors, hospitals, had online records? if you get sick in california, how much could we save? why haven't we done it.

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Can the economic recovery save our broken health care industry?