Encouraged by federal tax subsidies worth an estimated $250 billion in 2013, many U.S. employers provide coverage as part of their compensation plans; employer-sponsored insurance covers more than 150 million workers and their dependents. The next largest source of coverage, Medicaid, insures less than half as many, 70 million; Medicare enrolls 50 million; and the Affordable Care Act marketplaces and individual market provide coverage for about 17 million.
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2 ... -insurance150 million WORKERS with health care
70 million medicAID
50 million mediCARE - over 65
17 million ACA
TOTAL 287 million
316 million USA Population 2013
So that’s 19 million dependents. Sounds low! Maybe that’s the number of uninsured?
Or 150+19 is 169 (say 170) million receiving employer sponsored health care.
But using those numbers ($250 billion / 170 million) is about $1,470/person subsidy.
NHE National Health Expenditure
NHE grew 3.9% to $3.5 trillion in 2017, or $10,739 per person, and accounted for 17.9% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
.
https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics ... sheet.htmlMedicare spending grew 4.2% to $705.9 billion in 2017, or 20 percent of total NHE.
60 million on MediCARE 2017
$706,000,000,000/19,000,000. Is $11,8000/Medicare person.
Medicaid spending grew 2.9% to $581.9 billion in 2017, or 17 percent of total NHE.
582,000,000,000/56 million (2017) is $10,400 per Medicaid person.
So the bottom line is it seems we are spending about $10,700/person on health expenditures. That to me a tremendous amount of money. And it doesn’t seem one model (medicare /medicaid) is spending a lot more than the other (private) models.
Every dollar of it comes out of the taxpayers pocket now, so in that sense we already have “single payer health care”, the single payer is the tax payer.
So if we are going to improve on this we need to find efficiencies and ways to not needlessly waste dollars.
I could get behind a Medicare for all where the individual is allowed to also buy additional insurance.
At most I could identify 19-20 million uninsured out of 316 million (2013). Or 7% of the population.
Seems to me it is no great cost to add those without insurance if we can then reduce the overall medical costs.
Am I missing something?