Say Anything Blog

Ed Lasky

Barack Obama claims - incredibly - that spending more on health care via his “public option” health care plan will lower costs. The Congressional Budget office found this assertion to be wrong (Obama makes up history, so why can’t he just make up future projections,as he has with the stimulus bill and its supposed benefits).

Now comes a study that points out that government run health care is actually more expensive than private-sector care. Jeffrey Anderson, the author of that study, says in a New York Post Op-ed that Obama’s rhetoric doesn’t match reality:

  My new study, published by the Pacific Research Institute, shows that—across four decades—the costs of government-run health care have risen far more than the costs of private care.

  My study compares the cost increases of Medicare and Medicaid with those of all other health care in the United States. The key finding: Since 1970, Medicare and Medicaid’s costs have risen one-third more, per patient, than the combined costs of all other health care in America—the vast majority of which is purchased privately.

  Since 1970, Medicare and Medicaid’s combined per-patient costs have risen from $344 to $8,955, while the combined per-patient costs of all other US health care have risen from $364 to $7,119.

  Medicare and Medicaid used to cost $20 less per patient than other care. Now they cost $1,836 more. (And that’s even without the Medicare prescription-drug benefit.)

  In fact, if the costs of Medicare and Medicaid had risen only as much as the costs of all other health care in America, then, instead of costing a combined $807 billion last year, they would’ve cost a combined $606 billion. That savings of $201 billion would have amounted to more than $1,750 per American household last year alone.

We should also keep in mind that doctors who accept Medicare and Medicaid patients often complain about the small reimbursements the government provides them. Yet the total cost for treating those patients is higher than it is for private sector patients.

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So, even though govt run healthcare costs the taxpayers more, the doctors get less!  How can this be?
The answer is actually simple: even with the infrastructure required for doctors to deal with the govt mandates and regulations, govt infrastructure costs much more, due to the inherent top-heavy nature of govt enterprise.
When you add in the cost of using a huge entity like the IRS to actually collect the money for govt healthcare, which is usually not factored in with the other costs of govt run systems, govt enterprise is woefully inefficient.
The private sector produces a good supply of affordable products, like cell phones, while making good profits, which create economic growth that is sustainable.
It can do the same thing for healthcare.