One of the most popular talking points on the Left involves arguing that every other “major country on Earth” guarantees healthcare to all, which the United States does not.
The talking point is an implicit suggestion that Americans are somehow more cruel than their comparatively civilized and humane counterparts on the world stage. It is accompanied by an argument for a massive increase in government spending on healthcare — to the tune of $32 trillion.
But this sidesteps a crucial reality: U.S. public spending on healthcare not only already exceeds the average of comparable countries, but also of highly socialized systems including Canada and the U.K.
To clarify the point, liberals like to argue that the U.S. spends twice as much on average on healthcare than other countries overall. But that number includes public and private spending. Doing so conveniently allows liberals to brand the U.S. private system as uniquely inefficient.
But if you ignore the private spending, and focus just on spending on Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare and other programs at the federal and state level, we already spend more on government healthcare than most other countries.
A Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of 2016 OECD data looked at how the U.S. compared to “countries that are similarly large and wealthy” when it comes to healthcare spending. As the chart below shows, U.S. governments at all levels spent 8.5 percent of gross domestic product on healthcare in 2016, more than the average of comparable countries (7.9 percent), the U.K. (7.7 percent), and Canada (7.4 percent). The only countries in the group that spent more were France (8.5 percent) and Germany (9.5 percent).
Contrary to the liberal myth that the reason we can’t afford to spend more on healthcare is that we’re spending too much on the military, the reality is that we spend much more on healthcare than the military.
From 2017 through 2026, healthcare spending at all levels is projected to be a combined $20.7 trillion, according to projections from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. That is more than triple the $6.6 trillion Congressional Budget Office projection for base defense spending over the same period. To be clear, this includes the Pentagon budget without accounting for the effects of supplementary funds for military operations. Since 2001, CBO has reported that supplementary funding has boosted the defense budget by 20 percent. Even assuming that over the next decade the supplementary budget would equal in percentage terms the post-9/11 build up and peak cost of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that would only bring defense spending to about $8 trillion over the 10-year period, still less than half of projected healthcare spending.
There is a very active debate in the healthcare policy community over why the U.S. spends more on healthcare than other countries, which could be the subject of another post. But in the meantime, it’s worth pushing back against the popular myth that the U.S. government is short-changing healthcare to spend money on other priorities such as the military. We don’t need a $32 trillion expansion in government healthcare spending when our government alone already spends more than other socialized systems.
