by Jonathan Huie

Created on: April 24, 2009   Last Updated: May 03, 2009

There are many reasons why adopting universal health care in the United States is the right thing to do. First, it would save money. Yes, you read that right - SAVE money. At first glance it would appear that providing better health care to more citizens would add substantial cost. There are more than 40 million Americans without health insurance. If no other changes were made in our health care system, providing basic health care to those 40 million Americans would increase the $1.9 trillion per year cost of the American health care system by an estimated $77 billion - about a 4% increase. But that 4% increase would only be present if we added yet another level of complexity to our bloated private payer system, and that would be foolish.

How can providing health care for the 16% of Americans who don't have insurance add only 4% to our nation's health care bill? The only health care now available to those without insurance is emergency rooms - the most expensive and least efficient mechanism for handling medical care. Routine care, preventative treatment and medication are far lower cost as well as being more humane than waiting until crisis drives sick people to the emergency room. In addition, today, many people enter our medicare system at 65 with conditions that could and should have been addressed years earlier under a more reasonable system. It costs our nation fully as much to perform a hip transplant at age 65 as it would have cost to save the individual years of suffering by performing the procedure earlier.

The statistics, but not the conclusion, that I present here are based on the 94 page document Accounting_for_the_cost_of_health_care_in_the_United _States by the prestigious McKinsey Global Institute. It's available free, and if you have the time, I highly recommend reading the whole report. It's packed with facts, and stops short of making recommendations.

Around the world, the per capita cost of health care is generally proportional to national income levels. The United States is the only developed country whose health care costs are dramatically higher than would be expected from our income levels. Our costs are $480 billion per year (33%) higher than would be expected from our income levels. Do we receive better health care for those dollars? Objectively, no. $480 billion is a huge amount of money. It's $1600 per year for every man, woman, and child. It's more than six times the additional cost of providing ongoing health care to those now without

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