Quote:
Originally Posted by Villages Kahuna
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Here's what we do know about national health expenditures (NHE) from 2007, the latest complete numbers available... - NHE grew 6.1% to $2.2 trillion in 2007, or $7,421 per person, and accounted for 16.2% of Gross Domestic Product.
- Medicare spending grew 7.2% to $431 billion in 2007, or 19 percent of total NHE.
- Medicaid spending grew 6.4% to $329 billion in 2007, or 15 percent of total NHE.
- Private spending grew 5.8% to $1.2 trillion in 2007, or 54 percent of total NHE.
- Hospital expenditures grew 7.3% in 2007, up from 6.9% in 2006.
- Physician and clinical services expenditures increased 6.5% in 2007, the same rate of growth as in 2006.
- Prescription drug spending increased 4.9% in 2007, a deceleration from the 8.6% growth in 2006.
What I thought was important to note here is that every single expenditure category grew at rates substantially higher than inflation. All those expenditures went to private service providers.
I guess I might ask that if the government is so bad, so inefficient, at providing the insurance to pay these bills, how will adding a profit margin of 15-50% make things cheaper for us?
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This is interesting.
- A NHE/GDP ratio can be misleading, as the question to which method of computing GDP (e.g., output, income or expenditure method) and what factors (and their weighting) went into the computation is unknown (it does make a difference!. Change any factor, or not include it (such as the $23Billion in remissions each year) and the numbers can be radically different.
- The annual percentage of NHE growth in the categories reflects what happens when an industry is vibrant. The auto industry used to be like that. The junk food industry seems to grow equal to the NHE. In addition, the NHE involves technological advances which have high RDTE costs and short life-span for recovery (new stuff comes out each day!).
- An aging person tends to consume more health care services, ergo costs to maintain/repair the health of an aging person tends to be higer than younger folk. This to me is common sense, but it would be good to have a medical actuary confirm this. So, the Medicare payroll taxes that workers (as most of us used to be) pay, plus the Medicare premiums, plus private supplements (costing the same as private insurance for workers) are logically needed to maintain/repair health of older folk.
The problem with government management goes back to: 1) can we conscript all medical professionals into government-run care clinics? 2) can the government establish salary limits on private medical professionals in private businesses similar to the NFL's salary cap program on teams? and 3) will the government agencies responsible to manage and operate national health care be limited in their funding to that collected specifically for health care, like the US Citizenship and Naturalization Service which operates solely on fees collected for immigration services?
#1 and #2 are legal problems (those "details" which seem minor to HR 3200 proponents) which fundamentally change our government and society - and so may require amending the Constitutional to be legal.
#3 is the killer. If the health care agencies are to be industrially funded, then the CBO forecasts are crucial to know what it really will cost us all - today, tomorrow, and the next decade. If the agency funding is to also depend on revenue from the General Treasury in addition to fees, that's a "hidden cost" to-be-determined - and that's where the overruns and "favorable estimation" come to play, and also higher taxes at numbers totally unknown at this time since there are no reliable estimates because all of the "how we're going to do this" stuff is still to-be-determined.
It still seems funny that folk are in a dire rush to spend potentially
$trillion$ on the short and long term without any sound set of numbers to back up what will be provided for the money and if it will even stand legal review (or it will be shut down after a lot of money is spent along the way). Those "nasty details" again....