Healthcare & the Deficit

If you're talking about the deficit, then you really need to be talking about healthcare. Here's why.

From a 2010 CBO report.

Social Security is not a problem. Other Federal Noninterest Spending is not a problem. Medicare and Medicaid is a problem. Why is that? Well, according to this chart ...

From Mother Jones.

... it's because we're getting older. Not much we can do about that. What we need to address is the pale green part of this graph — Spending in the Absence of Aging and Excess Cost Growth. And how do we do that?

From Wonkbook.

Simple — hire any other industrialized country in the world to run our health care system. The chart above is pretty damning. The US government spends more per capita on healthcare than anybody else, and our system is supposedly privately run. Now, if you'll take a look at what we spend in that sphere ...

From Wonkbook.

So, all told, we spend about $8000 per person on healthcare in this country. The second slot goes to ... bit hard to say, but each of Canada, France and England appear to spend about $4000 per person, or roughly half what we do.

If you want to reduce the deficit, reduce healthcare costs.