Canadian Institute for Health Information
December 5, 2006
The public and private shares of total health care spending have remained fairly steady over the past decade. This year, the public share is expected to account for 70.3% of total health care spending, in line with the 70/30 ratio of public/private spending seen over the last ten years.
http://secure.cihi.ca/cihiweb/dispPage.jsp?cw_page=media_05dec2006_e#2
Full report: National Health Expenditure Trends, 1975-2006
http://secure.cihi.ca/cihiweb/dispPage.jsp?cw_page=PG_592_E&cw_topic=592&cw_rel=AR_31_E
From a “Quote of the Day” earlier this week:
Mining data from the National Health Expenditures Accounts, Mr. (Thomas) Selden found that public expenditures on health care — Medicare, Medicaid, military health care and federal employee benefits — accounted for $888 billion of the $1.96 trillion spent on health care in 2004. Adding in the aforementioned subsidies (tax exemptions for employer-sponsored plans), and premiums paid for public-sector employees, the total comes to $1.2 trillion, or 61 percent.
Uwe E. Reinhardt, the James Madison professor of political economy at Princeton, suggests adding 5 percent for the federal mandate that hospitals provide free health care to the uninsured. “So government accounts for about two-thirds of health care spending,†Mr. Reinhardt said.
https://pnhp.org/news/2006/december/private_plans_pay_so.php
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
The policy lesson? Do not let anyone ever again claim that the new taxes required to fund a single payer system would require an intolerable drain on the economy. We are already paying those taxes, and the economy has not suffered as a result.
This does not mean that we don’t need new tax policies. Changes should be made to improve equity and increase transparency in our public financing of health care. The fairness and efficiency that a single payer system would bring us have been goals that have been elusive under our current fragmented system of funding health care.