American taxpayers footed the bill for at least $1.8 trillion in federal and state health care expenditures in 2022 — about 41% of the nearly $4.5 trillion in both public and private health care spending the U.S. recorded last year, according to the annual report released last week by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
On top of that $1.8 trillion, third-party programs, which are often government-funded, and public health programs accounted for another $600 billion in spending.
This means the U.S. government spent more on health care last year than the governments of Germany, the U.K., Italy, Spain, Austria, and France combined spent to provide universal health care coverage to the whole of their population (335 million in total), which is comparable in size to the U.S. population of 331 million.
Between direct public spending and compulsory, tax-driven insurance programs, Germany spent about $380 billion in health care in 2022; France spent around $300 billion, and so did the U.K.; Italy, $147 billion; Spain, $105 billion; and Austria, $43 billion. The total, $1.2 trillion, is about two-thirds of what the U.S. government spent without offering all of its citizens the option of forgoing private insurance.
But if we had universal healthcare, how would all the useless middlemen make their money?
Corporations are people. Didn’t you know?
They would move on to other amoral enterprises like cars/insurance/real estate/televangelism/etc
I get the sentiment, but it actually would be a positive thing. Most people in these industries are there because the jobs were available and paid well, even if those jobs only existed to produce more unjustifiable profits for the bloated system.
Remove the jobs, and those people might actually go on to play productive rather than parasitic roles in society.
By contributing to the building up of the productive forces. Fuck this stagnation bullshit, invest in infrastructure and urbanization, invest in clean energy, and automation. Cut out meaningless jobs.