Canadian Institute for Health Information
December 5, 2006
Health care spending to reach $148 billion this year

The public and private shares of total health care spending have
remained fairly steady over the past decade. This year, the public
share is expected to account for 70.3% of total health care spending,
in line with the 70/30 ratio of public/private spending seen over the
last ten years.

http://secure.cihi.ca/cihiweb/dispPage.jsp?cw_page=media_05dec2006_e#2

Full report: National Health Expenditure Trends, 1975-2006
http://secure.cihi.ca/cihiweb/dispPage.jsp?cw_page=PG_592_E&cw_topic=592&cw_rel=AR_31_E

From a “Quote of the Day” earlier this week:

Mining data from the National Health Expenditures Accounts, Mr.
(Thomas) Selden found that public expenditures on health care —
Medicare, Medicaid, military health care and federal employee
benefits — accounted for $888 billion of the $1.96 trillion spent on
health care in 2004. Adding in the aforementioned subsidies (tax
exemptions for employer-sponsored plans), and premiums paid for
public-sector employees, the total comes to $1.2 trillion, or 61
percent.

Uwe E. Reinhardt, the James Madison professor of political economy at
Princeton, suggests adding 5 percent for the federal mandate that
hospitals provide free health care to the uninsured. “So government
accounts for about two-thirds of health care spending,” Mr. Reinhardt
said.

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2006/december/private_plans_pay_so.php

Comment: The policy lesson? Do not let anyone ever again claim that
the new taxes required to fund a single payer system would require an
intolerable drain on the economy. We are already paying those taxes,
and the economy has not suffered as a result.

This does not mean that we don’t need new tax policies. Changes
should be made to improve equity and increase transparency in our
public financing of health care. The fairness and efficiency that a
single payer system would bring us have been goals that have been
elusive under our current fragmented system of funding health care.
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This commentary from Don McCanne’s Quote of the Day list:
Quote-of-the-day@mccanne.org
http://two.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/quote-of-the-day

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