One of the most significant domestic stories of the past four years is one that’s barely rated a notice from the news media. While the media’s attention has been focused on the really critical things, like leaked online photos of celebrities in the nude, something very important has happened: the runaway healthcare spending spiral appears to have been tamed, at least for now.

While that, perhaps, can’t compete with the prospect of Jennifer Lawrence’s bare breasts, let’s think for a moment about what this all means. Anyone who has paid attention to actual news in the past decade will certainly recall the drumbeat of concern over the nation’s long-term deficits, and the prospect that the retirement of the baby boom would swamp the country in debt. Medicare has been the biggest concern— at various times the program’s trust fund was forecast to be depleted as early as the mid-2020s and projected cumulative shortfalls in the program over time were forecast to be in the trillions of dollars. Those projections were based on a Medicare program that, for years, had watched as its cost increases far outstripped the rate of general inflation and the growth of the economy as a whole. Such trends, extended over decades, invariably reveal very scary numbers.

But then things changed— and the biggest change of all was passage of the Affordable Care Act, which has clearly played a role in bending that cost curve that President Obama has often talked about. The ACA included a long list of changes to the incentive structure for Medicare that helped break the strict fee-for-service system that had been in place for years. Among them was a change that stopped rewarding hospitals and other healthcare providers by paying them to care for patients suffering from infections or other complications stemming from prior treatment at those facilities. The change in incentives has already reduced readmission rates, which averaged 19 percent from 2007-2011, to 17.5 percent. That may seem small, but it represents a significant savings across such a vast program. And, of course, that’s just one example of the ways that the ACA is reshaping the delivery of health care in the U.S.

While the Affordable Care Act has been derided by critics to an extent probably unprecedented in American history— some of it deserved— the longer it’s been around, the better it’s starting to look.

Certainly the numbers are encouraging. For one, implementation of the insurance mandate has already dropped the number of uninsured in states across the country, including Minnesota where 95.1 percent of state residents now have health insurance. That’s a remarkable achievement.

While most other states have yet to show that kind of progress, virtually every state has seen noticeable declines in their numbers of uninsured. Many Republican-led states have seen less improvement, as a result of their purely political decision to block implementation of the Medicaid expansion included as part of the ACA. But expect to see more progress in a number of those states, as even Republican governors and legislatures are beginning to acknowledge the actual benefits to residents from many of the provisions of the ACA, otherwise known as Obamacare. Over the next year or so, look for a number of Republican-led states to sign up for the Medicaid expansion.

As for Medicare, which is the national health insurance program for seniors in the U.S., the news has been equally encouraging. Between 2000 and 2010, the average annual growth rate in Medicare spending has topped 12 percent, a rate of growth that led to those very scary debt projections I mentioned earlier. But since 2010, the growth in Medicare spending has fallen to its lowest rate in history, averaging about 4.6 percent annually. That’s a huge change, one that is saving the Medicare program almost $1,000 per beneficiary, compared to earlier projections. By 2019, according to a recent analysis by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, Medicare is now expected to spend $2,400 less per beneficiary than previous projections. As a result, the Medicare trustee board, in a report issued a few weeks ago, extended the estimated depletion date of the Medicare hospital care trust fund by four more years, to 2030. If these trends continue, expect the trustees to continue to push that date out even further.

What’s more, the latest trustees’ projections show that without the changes incorporated into Medicare by the ACA, the program would consume six percent of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product by 2040 and 8.4 percent by 2088. As a result of implementation of the ACA, however, the trustees now expect Medicare’s growth to slow considerably, to 5.5 percent of GDP by 2040 and 6.3 percent by 2088. Such differences, extended over those decades, entail savings in the trillions of dollars.

The slowdown in growth in Medicare spending is not just beneficial in the long-term. The other widely missed domestic story is the dramatic drop in the current federal deficit, which the Congressional Budget Office now projects will fall to $492 billion, or about 2.8 of the GDP. That’s a smaller deficit, in terms of GDP, than under the Reagan administration. Much of that improvement is due to the economic recovery, but the slowdown in healthcare spending is also contributing to the better finances. During the five and a half years of the Obama administration, the deficit has now been cut by two-thirds from the $1.3 trillion hole he inherited at the height of the financial collapse.

Think about it— major improvements in the current deficit. Massive improvements in long-term debt projections. It’s a heck of a good news story. Too bad the media’s and the public’s attention is elsewhere.