The True Cost of Healthcare

All over the country, it seems that the one topic on everybody's mind is healthcare. Be it the various town hall meetings from Altantic to the Pacific, or the irrefutable center of the health care debate, Washington DC, everybody seems to be talking about health care and ways to reform it. Few of the ideas for reform being thrown out include providing coverage for every individual in the country, promoting electronic medical records, reducing costs by providing the right incentives for physicians and other providers etc. But nobody seems to be talking about the cost of the current system and the toll that it is having on the economy as a whole.

In a recent article How Healthcare Killed by Father, David Goodhill discusses the true cost of the healthcare hidden or otherwise and the return on investment that we are getting by paying into a system that is broken. The paragraph below highlights, how much we are losing in terms of other growth opportunities by not reforming a bad and broken system:

Yet spending on health care, by families and by the government, is crowding out spending on almost everything else. As a nation, we now spend almost 18 percent of our GDP on health care. In 1966, Medicare and Medicaid made up 1 percent of total government spending; now that figure is 20 percent, and quickly rising. Already, the federal government spends eight times as much on health care as it does on education, 12 times what it spends on food aid to children and families, 30 times what it spends on law enforcement, 78 times what it spends on land management and conservation, 87 times the spending on water supply, and 830 times the spending on energy conservation. Education, public safety, environment, infrastructure—all other public priorities are being slowly devoured by the health-care beast.