Be careful out there, friends, the bogeyman is lurking: single-payer healthcare. Or so The Wall Street Journal warns its readers today in a piece focused on the inevitable rise in health care costs–inevitable under the dumb system we have today.
As pressure grows for the government to pick up more of the nation’s health-care tab, new data show its contribution is already at 45% and is expected to approach 50% within 10 years.
The government’s widening role in financing health care stems from the recent expansion of Medicare to include prescription drugs, the growth of relatively new initiatives like the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, increased spending by enrollees in programs like Medicaid — which covers many of the sickest patients — and cutbacks in employer-sponsored health coverage.
Overall, health spending in the U.S. is expected to double to $4.1 trillion by 2016, consuming 20% of the nation’s gross domestic product, up from the current 16%, according to a new federal study. By then, the study predicts, the government will be paying 48.7% of the nation’s health-care bill, up from 38% in 1970 and 40% in 1990.
The stark projections come amid increasing ferment over health care in the states and Washington. They could bolster the argument of some analysts that the U.S. is creeping toward a single-payer system in a disorganized, piecemeal way. Under such a system, the government essentially pays for health care and covers the cost by collecting taxes and premiums.
I added the emphasis. This reminds me of the Red-scare poster, which I have a copy of, that asks ominously, if you are breeding Bolsheviks in your bathroom because of a lack of proper hygiene (an ad for wash towels). Anyway, we wouldn’t be in the mess described by the article–that we will consume 20 percent of the gross national product on health care by 2016–if we already had a single-payer system. If that’s what the Journal is warning (and the rest of the article has some hand-wringing about the demise of the “free market” system in health care, then, I say let’s get cracking now, why wait?
