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July 18, 2009
Government run health care more expensive than private sector care - Study
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.
Obama and the Congressional Democratic majority want to worsen the problem by shifting everyone, eventually through legislative legerdemain, to public run health care. This would exacerbate a fiscal crisis that already is emerging with the Medicare and Medicaid.
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