Short Diary:
An article in today's WaPo, getting circulated fast, says the government by 2012 will be paying half of all health care costs in the US. Total healthcare spending in the US is about $2.5 Trillion with governments currently paying $1.2 Trillion, mostly through Medicare and Medicaid. While the shallow story the msm will pick up is that the government already is spending too much, the true story is that health care costs have to get lowered to save both family income and government budgets.
Richard Foster, Medicare's top economic forecaster, said the recession has only worsened the two stubborn problems facing the U.S. health care system, lack of insurance coverage and high costs. "All that argues that some form of health care reform is a good idea," Foster said.
Even as the economy shrank because of the downturn, health care spending grew by 5.7 percent from 2008. Spending by government grew nearly three times faster than private spending, closing in to overtake it.
Driving much of the government surge was Medicaid, the federal-state program for low-income people, which grew by nearly 10 percent as workers lost jobs with health insurance, and Democrats expanded coverage for children of the working poor Total spending on prescription drugs grew by slightly more than 5 percent, as higher prices for brand name medications overpowered the widespread availability of generics.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Other western countries - including those with government-run health care - also have problems with costs. But the U.S. spends much more per person than any other country, without getting better results in life expectancy and many other measures of health.