Obamacare is falling short on a key goal of President Barack Obama’s 2010 healthcare reform act: Boosting preventive medicine.

In fact, per-capita public health spending has dropped 9.3 percent since 2008 — including a $40.2 billion decrease in disease-prevention and related programs through 2014, according to an article published in the American Journal of Public Health.

A primary goal of the Affordable Care Act is to emphasize disease prevention over treatment and care, by mandating insurance coverage of clinical preventive services such as mammograms and cancer screenings. The law’s advocates have argued such efforts would hold down healthcare costs and boost public health in the U.S.

But the latest research suggests funding for public health programs to prevent disease has actually been declining since passage of the law. Meanwhile, overall costs for insurance and healthcare — to consumers and businesses alike — have risen 27 percent since 2010, according to a recent analysis by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

The new study — by Drs. David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, of the City University of New York School of Public Health at Hunter College and Harvard Medical School — examined five decades of federal health statistics.

They found that per-capita public health spending in the U.S. rose from $39 in 1960 to $281 in 2008, but it has fallen by 9.3 percent since then. They concluded that if funding had remained at the 2008 level of $281 per capita, an extra $40.2 billion would have been devoted to public health between 2009 and 2014.

"Obamacare was supposed to add $15 billion to public health funding. But in 2012, Congress cut that by $6.25 billion, and sequestration imposed further cuts in 2013,” Dr. Himmelstein said. “This year, public health will get less than half of the $2 billion promised by the ACA. And state and local government public health spending has also fallen, even while their other health expenditures have continued to rise."

Dr. Woolhandler said the U.S. health care system is "dangerously out of balance" — spending increasing amounts on treating disease, but less on less costly prevention strategies that can boost health and longevity.