cowpies and roadkill are excluded from this offer
bloated and bureaucratic

I'm on a tear of low-commentary blog posts, but Krugman's column today really drives home how broken our political system is. Talking about the arguments against nationalizing US health care he notes:

In 2002, the latest year for which comparable data are available, the United States spent $5,267 on health care for each man, woman and child in the population. Of this, $2,364, or 45 percent, was government spending, mainly on Medicare and Medicaid. Canada spent $2,931 per person, of which $2,048 came from the government. France spent $2,736 per person, of which $2,080 was government spending.

Amazing, isn't it? U.S. health care is so expensive that our government spends more on health care than the governments of other advanced countries, even though the private sector pays a far higher share of the bills than anywhere else.

So, in essence, our private health care system costs taxpayers as much or more than privatized countries, while it costs private individual users substantially more to get medical treatment. This also ignores the fact that substantial swaths of the American public are entirely without health coverage. What will it take for Americans to realize that groups like the AMA and the pharmaceutical lobby don't have our best interests at heart, and much of their political rhetoric is completely self-serving?

Posted by McChris at April 15, 2005 02:47 AM
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