Link: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/02/04/govt-pay-half-health-costs/

Gov’t to Pay More Than Half of U.S. Health Costs

For all the hue and cry over a government takeover of health care, it’s happening anyway.

Federal and state programs will pay slightly more than half the tab for health care purchased in the United States by 2012, says a report by Medicare number crunchers released Thursday.

That’s even if President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul wastes away in congressional limbo. Long in coming, the shift to a health care sector dominated by government is being speeded up by the deep economic recession and the aging of the Baby Boomers, millions of whom will soon start signing up for Medicare.

“This does mark a pretty stark jump in the data,” said Christopher Truffer of Medicare’s Office of the Actuary, which prepared the analysis published in the journal Health Affairs.

The tipping point is likely to come next year, Truffer said. For technical reasons, the report assumes that Congress is going to allow Medicare to cut doctor fees by 20 percent later this year, as required by a 1990s budget law. But lawmakers have routinely waived such cuts, and they’re not likely to allow them in an election year. So government probably will end up picking up most of the nation’s medical costs in 2011, instead of 2012.

More detail here: http://www.usnews.com/mobile/articles_mobile/government-to-pay-for-more-than-half-of-us-health-care-costs/index.html

As jobless Americans lost private health insurance coverage and joined the Medicaid rolls during the recession, U.S. health spending jumped 5.7 percent to $2.5 trillion in 2009, government projections show.

That means that American taxpayers will foot the bill for more than half of U.S. health care expenditure by 2012, the report’s authors said.

Overall, health care’s share of the gross domestic product (GDP) – a measure of the value of goods and services produced in the United States – climbed 1.1 percentage points to 17.3 percent in 2009.

That’s the largest one-year increase since 1960, when officials began tracking total U.S. health care spending, analysts noted in a report published online Feb. 4 by the journal Health Affairs.

From the Wall Street Journal:

What is newsworthy, however, is another figure reported by the BLS: 52 percent of all union members work for the federal or state and local governments, a sharp increase from the 49 percent in 2008.[5] A majority of American union members are now employed by the government; three times more union members now work in the Post Office than in the auto industry.[6]
While the fact that the majority of union members are government employees is historic, the growth of government employee unions is hardly a recent development. Union membership has steadily grown in government and shrunk in the private sector since the 1970s.

Read the rest of a very interesting study here; http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704509704575019552907349936.html

I’m not sure how the forum is supposed to work or how a discussion is started, but thus far there seems to be little activity.

http://blounttn.org/forum/

As citizens, maybe we aren’t prompting proper discussions.