The cost of health care in the United States will rise from its present sixth of the total economy to a fifth by 2017:
Health-care spending will devour an expanding share of the U.S. economy during the next decade, accounting for nearly 20 percent of the national gross domestic product by 2017, government officials forecast yesterday.
Economists at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services forecast that health-care spending will reach about $4.3 trillion in 2017, almost double what it was in 2007. Health care accounted for 16.3 percent of national GDP — the sum of all goods and services produced within U.S. borders — last year.
Even the rosiest predictions and most optimistic plans of those proposing healthcare reform don’t envision controlling costs enough to prevent healthcare from taking a substantially larger chunk out of the budget at that rate of increase. That means we’ll have that much less to spend on everything else e.g. education, infrastructure, and industries that could actually employ a lot more people at good wages. Note, too, that the healthcare sector is very highly subsidized. Half of each healthcare dollar comes from taxes in one form or another. There are hefty tax increases in your future.
I continue to believe that only a combination of factors that includes reducing the bite that the insurance industry takes (whether by going to a single-payer system or some other as yet unproposed system) and a dramatic increase in the supply of healthcare will resolve this problem.
4.3 Trillion dollar increase cost for health care..does anyone know what part of health care cost are increasing…is this based on a prediction that more
people will be less healthy, medical personnel salary increases, the cost of drugs, just what part of that increased cost is it that will be increasing?