An article in today’s New York Times, “Health Spending in U.S. Topped $3 Trillion Last Year”, reports:
“Health spending in the United States last year topped $3 trillion — an average of $9,500 a person — as five years of exceptionally slow growth gave way to the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid and private insurance coverage, and as prescription drug prices resumed their sharp climbs, the government said Wednesday…
“Total spending on health care increased 5.3 percent last year, the biggest jump since 2007, and accounted for 17.5 percent of the nation’s economic output, up from 17.3 percent in 2013, the Department of Health and Human Services said in its annual report on spending trends. By contrast, health spending grew 2.9 percent in 2013, the lowest rate of increase since the federal government began tracking it in 1960.
“ ‘Millions of uninsured Americans gained health care coverage in 2014,’ said Andrew M. Slavitt, the acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. ‘And still the rate of growth remains below the level in most years prior to the coverage expansion, while out-of-pocket costs grew at the fifth-lowest level on record.’ ”
If the USA followed the lead of all other nations with advanced economies and adopted a Single Payer System, such as Medicare for Everyone, the cost would be $6,000 or less per person.
How can we discern that? Because that costs would still be a bit high compared with the other nations and on par with France which is considered to provide the best health care in the world.
We are still paying for the folly of providing employers a tax exemption for payment towards employee health care, a practice adopted during World War II to attract scarce workers when there was a freeze on wages. It totally distorted and misdirected our health care system.
Single Payer reform probably is politically impossible at this time since there are so many special interests feeding from the trough of excessive health care expenses. Our best hope is that Affordable Care Act provisions to reduce costs will achieve long term inefficiencies over time and for new legislation allowing Medicare to negotiate for drug prices.
