This June, Gov. Ralph Northam signed a state budget bill that gives 400,000 low-income Virginians access to government health insurance. This is happening not just in Virginia. US states continue to expand Medicaid, including”red states” like Utah, Nebraska, and Idaho.
The recent expansions of Medicaid, however, are just the latest step in a quickly expanding government-funded healthcare apparatus that has been growing for decades. Government-sector healthcare makes up half of all healthcare spending in the United States.
Using data from the OECD’s 2015 Health Statistics report, government spending in the United States accounted for 48% of overall health spending, compared with an OECD average of 73%.
U.S. government-sector spending (mostly Medicaid, Medicare, VA, etc.) matches most other OECD countries and is on a par with Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Austrian, New Zealand, and others.
According to the World Health Organization, per capita, government spending on healthcare is the fourth highest in the world.
So, any argument that considers ours a “free market” in health care is not accurate.
The U.S. healthcare market is expansive, expensive, and dominates the industry. With so many Baby Boomers going on Medicare in the near future, and with the continued expansion of Medicaid, it won’t be many more years before a much larger majority of healthcare spending is done by governments.
This is not new, but part of an established trend.
The US is currently approaching levels of public spending that will rival those of some nations that offer what we like to consider socialized healthcare.
The problem is that as the federal government becomes the largest single payer for healthcare purchases in the US, there is no longer any functioning market pricing system in healthcare. The industry is now dominated by government contracts, government spending, and government regulations on healthcare services.
Prices respond by going up because healthcare is heavily subsidized by various government interventions. Subsidized goods and services experience growing demand as the cost — as perceived by consumers — goes down. In most other government-controlled healthcare systems, costs are controlled by denying care or making folks wait in long queues.
America now has an enormous “public” healthcare system–socialized medicine is here, so market-based healthcare instead needs to carve out a niche in a government dominated sector. The discussion is now one of “de-regulation,” “flexibility,” for a truly free fee-for-service economy to develop.
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what should one do to qualify for this program, where do you go to find out if your eligible or not?
This announcement is good but not clear for the folks not in the know how this service works.
My niece qualifies but is at lost to register with the proper Department.
Any suggestion from someone that knows the ropes, I’d appreciate it.
Nancy Sacco niece to Anthony Sacco, Thank you
Frank town Health put me together with a person who can help with the paperwork.
Let us face reality here.
In the United States of America, “healthcare” is a for-profit industry, which as an associate level public health engineer, I find positively obscene, that one can profit off the bad health or sickness of another, but such it is in this country, by government fiat.
The more sick people there are, the more profits there are to be made.
The more sick people there are, all the better for the GDP and Wall $treet.
So who is to supply those profits?
Obviously somebody with money, which eliminates the sick poor people.
How to get around that?
Either by prevention, which is what public health engineers are supposed to exist for (a big ******* joke that is in reality), or have the government, which has a lot of money waiting to be tapped, step in and pay the freight.
Since prevention robs the for-profit healthcare industry of profits (healthcare costs are rising faster than inflation in this country if one pays attention to the statistics), prevention is left on the side of the road.
We just had an examp0le of that the other day in a Detroit Free Press article entitled “Flint water crisis: State’s medical chief faces trial for manslaughter” by the Associated Press, published Dec. 7, 2018, as follows:
LANSING, Mich. — Michigan’s chief medical executive will stand trial on involuntary manslaughter and other charges in a criminal investigation of the Flint water crisis, a judge ruled Friday.
Dr. Eden Wells, a member of Gov. Rick Snyder’s Cabinet, is among five people facing an involuntary manslaughter charge in connection to an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in the Flint area in 2014 and 2015.
Wells is now the second high-ranking state official, along with Health and Human Services Director Nick Lyon, to be ordered to trial.
Wells leaned of the trial decision from Judge William Crawford II while inside a Flint courtroom.
Wells has denied any wrongdoing, and her attorney say she had no legal duty to warn the public and worked diligently to investigate and resolve Flint’s water issues.
Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette charged Wells last year with obstruction of justice and lying to the police, and he later added the manslaughter charge.
Schuette has said key officials, including Wells, knew about a spike in Legionnaires’ but waited too long to tell the public.
end quotes
Her attorney say she had no legal duty to warn the public?
Then what the **** was her duty?
To keep her back turned?
I personally surmise that, because I was told to do the same – HUSH!
Don’t make waves!
And that is a capsule summary of healthcare in America today – a gig ******* joke, unless you own healthcare stocks, of course.