The US is number 3 in the world for PUBLIC percapita financing of health care. True or False?

Question

The answer is True. Yes folks for a nation who prides itself on not having socialized medicine...we already do. So why are we third for something we're not supposed to have?

source

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_hea_car_fun_pub_per_cap-care-funding-public-per-capita

Answer 1

Which proves how inefficiently the government handles our money for health care and why they shouldn't be entrusted with even more responsibility over it.

Answer 2

You'll probably find that we have very high health-care costs, as well.

There are some good reasons for that. One is exchange rates - everything in America is expensive relative to some countries because of the relative 'strength' of the dollar. Even though we don't have socialized medicine, we have the next worth thing: third-party payor medicine, aka 'insurance.' Having your insurance company pay the bills insulates you from cost, and even gives you an incentive to use as much health care as possible to 'get your premiums worth.' Both effects increase demand. Demand is further increased because we have a large, aging, population. Health care is tightly regulates, that impedes growth of in supply. Greatly increasing demand meets limited suply, you have high cost.

High cost means a lot of spending to finance whatever Public health care you do have. It just so happens that one segment of the population that we do provide Public Health Care to is the elderly. The eldery, just coincidentally, have the greatest demand for health care, not to mention require some of the most expensive forms of health care.

Answer 3

Here is the projected spending by all levels of government on the five biggest government programs for 2007:

Government Pensions: $875 billion
Government Health Care: $850 billion
Government Education: $750 billion
National Defense: $650 billion
Government Welfare: $425 billion

They start with nearly a trillion dollars a year in government pensions-and baby boomers aven't yet started to collect their, I mean our, Social Security yet. Then there is $850 billion in government health care, mostly Medicare and Medicaid-and baby boomers haven't yet started to collect on our Medicare.

There is $750 billion in government education-K-12, universities, and the like. When the educators talk about underfunding education, what are they talking about? Finally, after this important stuff, we come down to the Pentagon, the veterans, and the military-industrial complex. I know what you are thinking. You are thinking: Enough with the
military-industrial complex routine already. I agree.

But the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex are only running a distant fourth place in the "fill-in-the-blank"-industrial complex stakes. Let us talk about the pension-industrial complex. You can read a horror story about it every day, like this one about the underfunded pensions of the State of New Jersey. Did you know that the payment of pensions to government employees is guaranteed in the constitution of many states? First things first.

Let us talk about the education-industrial complex. We spend $750 billion a year for that baby. Yet literacy in the United States has not significantly changed in the 160 years since centralized government education began in the United States. As I reported recently in The American Thinker: 15 percent of US adults [today are rated] as "proficient" in literacy and 13 percent "proficient" in numeracy." That is according to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy.

Answer 4

I don't know this for a fact, but I imagine that a lot of the expenditure can be accounted for by only a few things:
- Veterans' health care system
- State programs (it says public expenditure, not national gov't expenditure)
- insuring kids

So, erm, what's the problem?

Answer 5

Because a big fat America hater (Michael Moore) said we are not.

To the people above and below me. This number includes funding to hospitals, medicare, medicade, prevention programs, ect.

Answer 6

It must be welfare. That's the only form of gov health care, unless they are counting the military on top of welfare.

Answer 7

Since, as you assert, we have socialized medicine, you can go ahead and start paying the monthly premiums I don't have every month.

Next question.

Answer 8

You really shouldn't believe everything you read...especially on the internet.

Answer 9

Cause the polls you look at are BS.