August 27, 2006
Government-funded Health Care
Arnold Kling
it turns out that taxpayers bankroll 51 percent of the nation's $2 trillion health care bill: this includes paying for private insurance for public employees (accounting for 6 percent of total health care spending), Medicare (17 percent of the total), Medicaid and SCHIP (16 percent), and other public health services including veterans’ programs, public hospitals, and school programs (12 percent)...But even those numbers don’t do justice to how much of total health care spending is subsidized by taxpayers. In 2004, when employers laid out roughly $443 billion for health benefits for their employees and retirees, employers deducted that $443 billion from their taxable income as part of the cost of doing business...in 2004 the government lost $108.5 billion in tax revenues and another $66.4 billion in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare.
And yet she blames health care cost inflation on the lack of government involvement in health care.
I should send her a copy of Crisis of Abundance.
RETURN TO: Econlog Main | Archives | Top of page
READ MORE: Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)
CATEGORIES: Economics of Health Care (332)