I’ll bet Barack Obama will be mad as hell when he sees this on MSNBC today. Oh, wait … According to a new study by a group backing single-payer as an alternative, the Affordable Care Act has forced administrative costs in health care to skyrocket, precisely the opposite of how its backers claimed it would lower costs:

Last year we, and many others, drew attention to the chaotic and costly roll out of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) exchanges. The chaos is mostly over (unless King prevails over Burwell), but the costs will linger on. The roughly $6 billion in exchange start-up costs pale in comparison to the ongoing insurance overhead that the ACA has added to our health care system — more than a quarter of a trillion dollars through 2022. …

Between 2014 and 2022, CMS projects $2.757 trillion in spending for private insurance overhead and administering government health programs (mostly Medicare and Medicaid), including $273.6 billion in new administrative costs attributable to the ACA. Nearly two-thirds of this new overhead—$172.2 billion—will go for increased private insurance overhead (data not shown in table).

Most of this soaring private insurance overhead is attributable to rising enrollment in private plans which carry high costs for administration and profits. The rest reflects the costs of running the exchanges, which serve as brokers for the new private coverage and will be funded (after initial startup costs) by surcharges on exchange plans’ premiums.

Even that level of administrative cost will be “shocking,” according to the group:

Those costs will be particularly high this year, when overhead is expected to make up 45 percent of all federal spending related to the Affordable Care Act. By 2022, that ratio will decrease to about 20 percent of federal spending related to the law.

The study is based on data from both the government’s National Health Expenditure Projections and the Congressional Budget Office. Both authors are members of Physicians for a National Health Program, which advocates for a single-payer system.

“This number – 22.5 percent of all new spending going into overheard – is shocking even to me, to be honest. It’s almost one out of every four dollars is just going to bureaucracy,” the study’s other author, Steffie Woolhandler, said Wednesday.

Many will recall that one of the arguments for ObamaCare was that insurers didn’t spend enough of premium revenues on direct patient care. In fact, the law requires insurers to rebate customers if they spend less than 80% of premiums on direct care — which resulted in some checks going out to consumers in mid-2012, to the delight of Obama and his team in the middle of a tough re-election bid. Now we have hundreds of billions of dollars going explicitly to anything but care.

The idea was to force insurers to become more efficient, and other new laws and regulations aimed for the same result with providers. The result of the mandates, however, is added cost to everyone — not just insurers and providers, but government too in enforcing the mandates. This happens everywhere the federal government gets involved, especially in education, as Glenn Reynolds noted earlier this week. This effect is as predictable as the sun rising in the east.

This group claims that a full government takeover would solve the problem, but that’s nonsense. All one has to do is look at the rationing systems used in places like Canada and the UK to see how cost control gets applied when bureaucrats are in charge of those decisions. Lower-cost family practice might survive well enough, but the reimbursement controls on specialties such as transplants provide steep disincentives for providers to enter those specialties, and for single-payer markets to subsidize them. The end result is choice only for the most wealthy, and only access to subsistence care for most of those who pay through the nose for the “free care” provided by government in a non-competitive environment. If more government intervention lowered costs, we wouldn’t see these increases in incremental control.