I’m glad you asked. The very short answer is that we all do. As I have often stated at least ½ of this cost in unnecessary and is a real “tax” on our residents. Currently our per capita cost of healthcare exceeds $11,000 per year and is over $3.5 trillion in total. The Healthcare industry is by far the largest in the USA. It is larger than banking, automotive and insurance combined. This cost amounts to over 15% of our GDP and the per capita cost is 2 ½ times the average of the EU countries while almost all of these same countries rank higher in quality of care.
Currently approximately 39% of the total cost is subsidized by the Federal government in the form of Medicare and Medicaid.
55% of workers (about 80,000,000) have health insurance through their employers. The average cost of these policies is $7,188 for the companies and an additional $1,655 in deductibles and co-pays for employees. For employees that opt for the family policy the total cost is about $20,000 per year.
If we assume that 50% of the workers opt for a family plan then the total cost to companies and their employees amounts to about $1.15 trillion or 32% of the total.
The remaining 29% are paid in form of the Affordable healthcare plan premiums, deductibles and co-pays. Note that for lower income families some of this cost is subsidized by the government and is not included in the Medicare/Medicaid numbers. Estimates are that this will amount to an additional $100 billion in annual cost to the tax payer.
The average tax rate for the middle class in the USA is 24% and that is very low compared to the EU countries that average about 35%. However, we are paying an extra amount for substandard healthcare that amounts to another 20% in tax that someone has to fund. That tax burden is currently borne by companies and individuals in the form of insurance premiums, deductibles and co-payments.
Why are our healthcare costs so enormous you ask? For that answer I would encourage to read “Resurrecting Respect – True Patriotism” available from Amazon.com.
I try to deal with facts and not the opinions of a few persons. By objective and well-researched data, our quality of healthcare is substandard despite being the most expensive in the world. The extra cost for the service that we have is actually a tax that ends up being born by the middle class. It’s rather easy to do the math. The per capita cost of healthcare in our country exceeds $11,000 per year. This amounts to $44,000 for a family of four. The current average family income $68,700. Does that seem fair? If each person had to pay the cost it would amount to a tax of 66% just for this one item. I could go on and on about this. Does it seem fair that inflation-adjusted GDP has more than doubled in the past 20 years, but the average family income has increased less than 10-% over that same period?