America's Debt Problem Is a Health Care Financing Problem
If not for health care, the federal government would have virtually no debt. Over at McSweeney's, University of Michigan economist Robert Dittmar proposes a thought experiment to explain:
As a thought experiment, let's suppose that medical expenditures had been self-financed since the inception of government health care in the 1960s. What would our debt and deficit look like today? To answer this question, I simply added the medical care expenditure deficit back into the total government deficit. The result is depicted in [the figure below[ and is astounding (at least to me). Outside of medical expenditures and revenues, the Federal government sometimes ran a surplus and sometimes ran a deficit from 1966 until 1980. Starting in 1980, and lasting until 1994, the government consistently ran a deficit outside of medical spending, but from 1995 until 2010, it consistently ran a surplus. In 1994, the cumulative excess spending would have reached a bit over $1 trillion. But by 1999, debt due to sources other than medical spending would have been completely eliminated by surpluses! The government wouldn't have needed to borrow again until 2011.
Via John Goodman and the Incidental Economist.
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If we didn’t have a deficit, poor people would starve and die of cancer.
So, its a win/win?
If we didn’t have sick people, we wouldn’t need government health care.
This economist misses a fundamental fact: we don’t “pay into” Medicare and Social Security. The government could abolish Social Security and Medicare tomorrow without affecting your FICA and Medicare taxes by one penny. It’s an accounting gimmick.
Well, what’s the point of having children if not saddling them with crushing debt to finance our health care?
If humans were immortal we wouldn’t have a healthcare problem. As it is, 99 out of 100 people interviewed prefer spending an infinite amount of other people’s money to dying.
thanks