As reported in The Wall Street Journal, spending on publicly funding health care will soon account for half of all US healthcare spending.
For the first time, government programs next year will account for more than half of all U.S. healthcare spending, federal actuaries predict, as the weak economy sends more people into Medicaid and slows growth of private insurance.
The figures show how federal and state spending is taking a bigger role while Congress hesitates over a health-care overhaul.
Over the next ten years, health spending is expected to balloon to $4.5 trillion. Despite this, the government's health overhaul has stalled, Peter Landers reports. Government health programs are a growing burden on the federal budget, which is running annual deficits of more than $1 trillion, and rising health costs continue to batter private industry. By 2020, according to the new projections, about one in five dollars spent in the U.S. will go to health care, a proportion far beyond any other industrialized nation.
"It's going to be a desperate issue five to 10 years out," said Gail Wilensky, the former top Medicare official in the George H.W. Bush administration. She said the U.S. will have to decide soon between raising revenue to pay for Medicare or reducing benefits.
In 2008, the last year for which figures are available, government health care spending was 47% of the total health care spend.
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