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Gov't healthcare already upon us?
by andy
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.
02/05/10 01:23:57 pm, 
14 comments
But I happen to think like Gringrich does, government is the next "bubble".
Or it may be the head of the last admistration is right, when Cheney told Paul ONeill; "Defitcits don't matter". http://www.ontheissues.org/2004/Dick_Cheney_Budget_+_Economy.htm
Of course they really don't when we as a country can back them up, but now China holds that debt. Wonder what they think about the growth of our government? What is the ROI to China for our largess?
Still doesn't change the fact many taxpayers who are already funding this, are running a tighter household budget than they were a few years ago, and can't afford the current subsidy. Much less an increase.
Medicare for everybody would help with both the economic and health care problems facing people and the country but the corporations are opposed. Less understandably, so are people who will welcome and like Medicare when they get old enough but resist extending it universally now.
"Keep your grubbly government hands off my medicare!"
Why is it that whenever anyone or any political official tries to enact legislation to help keep the poorest of the poor in our country from brandishing pitchforks and torches; they immediately scream SOCIALISUM?!?!?
P.S. Nashville looks more like a Nathan Bedford Forrest re-union, than a representative group of average Americans, this week. Go Maverick, Go, Baby!
We have become such a selfish, greedy nation that we tend to overlook people from our own country. Some of these so called naysayers need to spend an evening or two in a few soup kitchens getting to know some of these people looking for handouts. They're really just people like you and me who have hit a bad patch in their lives and need some help. Instead most people in our country turn a blind eye.
If we do not turn a blind eye, then we might have to wonder why things here are similar to things in "foreign" lands that do not share "our values." I mean some of our poor are even white people!
I just think its a shame that a person can't afford health insurance or a trip to the doctors office.
Pro-Labour is ALSO correct. Without a self-sustained manufacturing base--building and creating the products we purchase here, then our nation will continue this climb to the bottom, of both technology and wealth building (playing with numbers in ANY stock market does NOT build true wealth).
Getting the Libertarians and Labour (L&L) to agree that Astronomical Healthcare prices are destroying ANY opportunity to create small companies here, would be a feat only the brave of heart would ever attempt.
Both L&L agree that for sister Sarrah to preach about opening up a 5th theatre of operations in Iran, is paramount to wiping away any chance of our descendents' success as a sovreign nation.
But what is the Libertarian angle on Isolationism and Tariffs?