Hereś the annual cost of the various components of government paid health care, with the latest figures I can find:
The elderly: $599 billion (Medicare)
The poor: $333 billion (Medicaid)
The workers: $250 billion (Tax subsidy for employer provided benefits)
Veterans: $39 billion (The VA)
Military: $50 billion (combined TRICARE and direct costs)
That´s not counting some smaller bits and pieces like federal employee health costs, payments and subsidies at the federal and state levels for charity care. The total spending was about $2.3 trillion So we´re talking about adding perhaps $100 billion per year more to this. The government already controls about 1/2 of health care expenditures in the US. It´s an incremental step, not wholesale adoption of communism, socialism or totalitarianism. It may eventually make some dent in the tens of thousands of US deaths every year attributable to a lack of insurance coverage. On the down side, it doesn´t do enough to control costs and it preserves a stupid employment based system. We can learn and adopt from other examples among wealthy nations who seems to spend much less while covering all (or the great majority) of their citizens.
