Government to Pay for More Than Half of U.S. Health Care Costs

[BrklynLiberal]

Golly, gee...Between Medicaid, Medicare and government employees, it looks like we almost have single payer health care in the US already!!!!!!!

THURSDAY, Feb. 4 (HealthDay News) -- 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.

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more at...

http://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/templates/news.aspx?ID=635696

[iceman66]

1. All the more reason why we need single payer!

[jwirr]

2. Medicaid, Medicare, Government employees (State, Fed, County),

VA, active duty military and their families, Indian Health System, Chips and that is just the beginning of the list. I have said this for years. More people are already covered by the government than have no insurance. What we need to do is consolidate all those above programs into one government health care program.

[Cleita]

3. Actually, the stats I saw said that 60% of health care is government health care by

the time you account for Medicare, Medicaid, Schips, Tri-Care, the VA and some others I can't think of right now, but that's 60% of people who have insurance or access to health care. There still are the uninsured and underinsured who can't afford it and they don't fall into those stats. This was one of the arguments that single payer advocates would have brought to the table if they would have been allowed to talk. Since 60% of those covered with health care are covered by government health care, why don't we close the gap to lower costs and increase coverage to everyone?