Health-Care Burden Shifts to U.S. Government as Spending Soars
By Alexandra Thomas – Bloomberg.com
Feb. 4 (Bloomberg) — Health-care spending in the U.S. will almost double in 2019 to $4.5 trillion, or more than 19 percent of the economy, as unemployment and aging baby boomers drive up government costs, economists forecast.
Spending already jumped to $2.5 trillion, or 17.3 percent of the economy, in 2009, the economists from the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said in their yearly estimate, published today in the journal Health Affairs. The increase in share of gross domestic product, from 16.2 percent in 2008, was the biggest since record keeping began in 1960.
Health-Care Burden Shifts to U.S. Government as Spending Soars – Bloomberg.com
When will the government discover that people don’t want them to become involved in health care. Almost every single federal government program is really a economic wreck, and tax payers tend to be kept holding the bag. If they are not able to get the job done they have been chosen to do, they will find out in November that people in the usa are sick and tired of their disappointments and definately will supplant them.
When will the people discover that the government is already involved in health care? Are they not aware of the government’s role in research, food and drug regulation, health insurance for the poor, the disabled, the elderly, the military, veterans, and Native Americans. Don’t forget the contribute to hospital construction, physician education, So when you add all of that together, the government pays for just over half of all health care expenses. But there is a peculiar quirk to the way the government counts those expenses. Health care for government employees – federal, state and local government employees, from your local policeman to the FBI, from your local dog catcher to Homeland Security employees – are all counted as private health care expenditures.
Seventy per cent of all working age adults are covered by health care from their employer but only 55% of private sector employees are covered by health insurance from their employer. There are, I am sure, a significant percentage of private sector employees who are covered by their spouse’s tax supported benefits. Talk about freeloaders!
The problem isn’t the government run program. The problem is that the private sector keeps mucking up the mess and doesn’t want the government to fix it because they are making too much money off all of the government supported programs.