http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_20th_century_chart.ht...
Health Everything Else (Per Capita, 2009 dollars)
1986 1141 10243
2016 4111 14484
Inc 2970 4241
https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/FYONGDA188S
1) 2015 is 20.55%. 1980 is 20.64%.
2) Recessions increase spikes as a share of GDP, really bad recessions have bigger spikes.
Another way to phrase it... If health spending had stayed constant since 2001, how much less "care" would the system be providing right now? All that extra spending is not pure waste, I'd love to see some hard studies on how much "waste" has increased and how exactly do you define it?
If you meant "economic gains" as-in healthcare's share of the overall pie has increased, and so healthcare as a sector of the economy has seen an outsized share of gains, that is definitely true.
for old people, who are not earning those wages.
blame socialism
ACA flattened the rating factors a lot to shift cost to younger insured. Personally I don't think that was good policy. You have a lot more disposable income after the kids graduate college, it's not necessarily a bad thing for health care costs to be shifted later in life. But annual premiums rise for the young anyway because their expected lifetime benefits are increasing substantially every day.
I guess my point is we all pay in, and we all ultimately take out of the system. If it was single-payer the cost would be exactly your marginal tax rate. As-is the cost is highly correlated with your marginal tax rate but just with a much lower cap.
And my point is that young people disproportionately pay in a larger value and disproportionately take out a smaller value.
> You pay based on your own expected lifetime cost, which is increasing substantially for those young employed workers.
So would a person who would be expected to live forever pay all his income? If you are expected to live longer then you should be expected to pay for longer and not more per year.
This doesn't make any logical sense.
The entire model is predicated on not paying in each year exactly how much you take out in benefits. That would completely defeat the purpose. So, of course young people pay more than they take out, while they are young. Almost all of those young people will also eventually get sick, hopefully old, and need health care for many years in excess of the amount they are paying in that year.
Are younger people actually subsidizing older people over the long-run, in other words, are younger people today on a track to pay in more than their expected lifetime cost? I doubt it, I think that would only happen if a future event dramatically cut the cost of care, you could end up having over-paid if care became abundant and cheap.
Another way to think about health insurance premiums is, you are born, you start $300,000 in debt. That's about the amount of healthcare you're going to consume, and you have your lifetime to pay it off. But that "debt" is also growing at ~5% based on increasing cost and complexity of available therapy, and average number of therapies someone can survive. The average 25 year old should have paid for about 30% but may have only actually spent 10% of their healthcare budget so far, but you can rest assured the balance will eventually be spent. Doesn't mean they are being ripped off by the old people!
and here's the gist of the scam. It's a pyramid scheme where the new entrants i.e. the young people pay for the old people's costs.
The young people would be far better off investing the money they are paying for old people's healthcare and then using that money for themselves when they are old.
And how much have the old people paid into ACA? They couldn't have possibly paid any because the ACA didnt exist when they were working. So where does the money to pay for their healthcare come from if not from the young people.
So yes they are being ripped off. Young people are having their hard earned money taken to keep old people on life support so they live longer to take more money from young people.
Most young people will eventually become old people. It's by definition not a "pyramid scheme" if average total lifetime benefits are designed to equal average total lifetime cost. It seems like you are upset that an insurance policy is acting like an insurance policy should by spreading cost over time and averaging costs across members of the pool?
That medical costs have positive feedback (better more expensive therapies allow patients to go on to have more, better, more expensive therapies) is definitely a huge fiscal challenge. But it's also why young people are more likely to be underpaying now for future benefits they will receive, not overpaying.
No, it's a scheme where the least expensive people pay for the most expensive people's costs. Insurance is like that.
Other notable things that happened in 1975: incarceration rates began their meteoric rise[3], and the "Halloween Massacre"[4] in which Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and George HW Bush seized power, becoming Secretary of Defence, Chief of Staff, and head of the CIA respectively.
I would be extremely wary of considering GDP a proxy for economic health, particularly when the military-industrial complex exists.
[1]http://www.usnews.com/dbimages/master/50614/GR_120513_Stone1... [2]http://www.the-crises.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/income-... [3]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/U.S._inc... [4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_Massacre
And one mans assets are another man's debt. This can unwind pretty fast. Look at all the people that are "entitled" to retirement benefits. Good luck with that in the long run.
Averages are very misleading.