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Edited on Tue Feb-03-09 01:39 PM by Juche
If you average out health care over the GDP as a whole, health care costs 16% of GDP, making up 2.2 trillion out of 14 trillion.
However, because America is a plutocracy about half of GDP is earned by the top 10%, and the other 90% earn the rest of the wealth. And since health care is spread among the population, it seems that you are spending 2 trillion in health care among 90% of the public, who combined only hold about 8 trillion in income, making health care more like 25-35% of GDP for the majority of Americans.
Median household income is about $50k. But an insurance policy for a family of 4 is about 13k. That alone takes up 26% (of course that is split between employers and employees). Then you have medicare taxes at 2.9% of income split between employer and employee. Then you have medicaid, SCHIP, NIH, CDC, etc.
If you add in employer and employee contributions as well as tax money to fund health care, a family of 4 making $50k a year is probably spending about 20k a year in health care, making health care closer to 30-40% of income for middle class families.
My math is probably wrong because you have to factor in employer payments into health care via their payments on insurance policies and taxes. But the real spending as % of income for middle class families for health care is probably closer to 30%, not the 16% that is always talked about.
Anyway, its alot worse than the statistics would say when you factor in the fact that the bottom 90% need the majority of the health care in the US, but only earn half the GDP to pay for it. So the old argument of 'health care makes up 16% of GDP' is pretty hollow when you realize that the vast majority of people, when you combine their incomes, only earn half the GDP.
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