The Numbers Obama Doesn't Talk About

Well, well. Seems that all those furriners ARE seeing healthcare spending increase.

Even faster than ours.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) collects data on health care expenditures for 30 countries. Take the last decade the data are available, from 1998 to 2007. During that time, per capita health care expenditures in the US rose on average by 7.2 percent per year. Expenditures for other countries actually rose on average by a percentage point more per year, 8.2 percent. Fourteen of the 24 countries beside the U.S. that had data over these years had a larger growth in health care spending that the U.S. A similar pattern occurs over the last twenty years.

For the average OECD country in 2007, government expenditures made up about 72 percent of all health care expenditures. At 45 percent, the U.S. is tied for the lowest share. Government spending made up more than 80 percent of health care spending in about a third of the countries. But making the US more like other countries and giving the government an even greater role doesn't seem to be the key to reducing costs. Indeed, the reverse is true -- countries where government has the highest share also faced the biggest increases in per capita expenditures. Using all the data available from 1960 to 2007 and accounting for per capita income as well as other factors, each one percent increase in a government's share of health care expenditures increases health care expenditures by about 0.4 percent.

I'll repeat: if you think healthcare is expensive now, wait until it's FREE!!