The next time someone tries to scare you about the cost of health care for all, here’s a nice stat from Krugman. The Congressional Budget Office just published an analysis of the Senate’s health care bill.
The budget office says that all this would cost $597 billion over the next decade. But that doesn’t include the cost of insuring the poor and near-poor, whom HELP suggests covering via an expansion of Medicaid (which is outside the committee’s jurisdiction). Add in the cost of this expansion, and we’re probably looking at between $1 trillion and $1.3 trillion.
That’s a huge amount of money, no? Not if you put it in context.
There are a number of ways to look at this number, but maybe the best is to point out that it’s less than 4 percent of the $33 trillion the U.S. government predicts we’ll spend on health care over the next decade. And that in turn means that much of the expense can be offset with straightforward cost-saving measures, like ending Medicare overpayments to private health insurers and reining in spending on medical procedures with no demonstrated health benefits.
So yes, it’s real money. But can we really say with a straight face that 4% is too much?
