Our Health Policy Matters

If there were an award given for the worst health policy exaggeration of 2011, it might well go to Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and a chorus of others who call the Affordable Care Act “a government takeover of health care.” They make this charge to capture votes from a constituency that fears what life would be like if we had “socialized medicine.”  The problem with the rhetoric is this.  It isn't true.  If you look at who pays the bill, the United States already has socialized medicine. We just get less for our money than practically anyone else in the world. According new data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) , no other country spends close to what our government alone does on health care.  Right now, the total government share of our annual per capita health care bill is around $6,000, or over 70% of the total .  Norway is next most expensive, but its total per capita bill is $5,352.  T...

If there were an award given for the worst health policy exaggeration of 2011, it might well go to Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and a chorus of others who call the Affordable Care Act “a government takeover of health care.” They make this charge to capture votes from a constituency that fears what life would be like if we had “socialized medicine.”  The problem with the rhetoric is this.  It isn't true.  If you look at who pays the bill, the United States already has socialized medicine. We just get less for our money than practically anyone else in the world. According new data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) , no other country spends close to what our government alone does on health care.  Right now, the total government share of our annual per capita health care bill is around $6,000, or over 70% of the total .  Norway is next most expensive, but its total per capita bill is $5,352.  T...