Saturday, February 11, 2012
The U.S. Does Not Have A Debt Problem...It Has A Health Care Cost Problem
This article discusses the problems the U.S. has been facing with rising health care spending. Currently, health care spending is growing at about 1.5 times the rate of growth of GDP, and is about 20% of the economy. If this growth continues, health care will eat up the federal budget. Health care spending has been a root cause of our debt problems, and the charts from this article show health care spending to rise from 5% of GDP to about 18% of GDP, which will crowd out social security and national defense. As a result taxes could rise, and the U.S. could get become a junk quality sovereign debt. This is an issue that will continue to be brought up throughout the year as we head into election time, and it will be interesting to see what will happen.
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6 comments:
If this is the case with our health care spending then it poses, in my eyes, a substantial question about where our economy should go. If the health care sector eats up so much Federal budget would it be wise or foolish to change to Universal health care?
This does reflect the chart we saw at class, which shows that the health care occupied such a big perfect of the whole government spending of the United states. Normal people might think in a totally opposite way because they feel the health system here is functioning badly. As the election coming soon, maybe it is time to have some real reform in the health sector.
Concerning rising silver age group, it's not surprising the health care cost is a problem. I don't understand why former planners have not thought about the increasing population and its cost in the first place. Do you think there was a political interest when planning the health care program?
It always raises heated debate when the issue of health care spending is discussed. As the election is coming, some further solutions will/might be brought up. However, we might/should think about this issue from different perspective; whether the government spending on health care is the only way to help people afford their health care bills. How about the hospital/medical system itself? The government might/should solve the problem from its roots, the health care system itself. Whether the hospital or related services agencies should (have the right to) charge such a high fee for taking caring people? Could the governments take some measurements to regular the medical expenses in a more reasonable way?
A Universal health care system may work, as it more likely cheaper to keep everyone relatively healthy than to fall back on tax payers for a surgery on someone who can't afford it. However, America is fat.
This is not the most exciting thing to read about because we do not want health care to become an issue here. Health care is an extremely important topic that affects everyone in the United States, let's hope that this can get figured out soon.
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