How much does the American taxpayer pay for healthcare? Official figures for 2005 suggest that 45.4% of healthcare funding comes from the government. This is in the form of Medicare, Medicaid, County Hospital Emergency Rooms, the VA and other direct government funding arrangements. The rest of the funding comes from private insurers who charge premiums to employers and to individuals.
But wait a minute there are many public employees; who pays for their health insurance? That's right; the government. In fact a quarter of all employer contributions to insurance premiums comes from the taxpayer - around $120 billion a year.
And that's not all. There are tax subsidies for private insurance, mainly benefiting wealthy taxpayers - these amount to nearly $190 billion a year. In all the American taxpayer pays 9.7% of GDP on healthcare, a greater proportion of taxpayers money than any country on earth except Norway (a small country of 4.6 million people that owns half the oil in the North Sea), Luxembourg (a small country of half a million people mostly employed in banking) and Switzerland (a small country of 7.5 million people mostly employed in banking and making chocolate and cuckoo clocks).
The taxpayer already funds 60% of healthcare costs in America.
1 comment:
Well, let's stop there!
I have health insurance and I pay a hefty co-pay every time I see a doc or have a procedure done. I pay about $500 for every MRI, which is a lot less than the fictitious charge from the hospital, and about 1/2 or 1/3 of the true charge.
I used to have a great policy. It paid something like 20 percent for the first $5,000, and then 110% to make up for the cost for the first $5,000, then 90% above something like $15,000. It protected the person from ruinous diseases such as CLL, but run-of-the-mill stuff like colds and broken bones, you took care of. It made one choose very wisely.
It would never happen here because the liberals would find some illegal alien who had a snot-nosed kid who somehow would have not been reimbursed 100 percent, and we just can't have illegals not bankrupt our system.
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