The Office of the Actuary at the Centers for Medicare Services does an annual analysis of health spending. It is very useful for understanding who pays for health care and what the spending goes for. The analysis of 2023 spending has been released. Total health spending was $4.9 trillion in that year and increased by 7.5% year-over-year and was $14,750 per person. On an after-inflation basis, spending rose 4.4%, which is a very rapid rate of growth. 92.5% of the population had some form of health insurance.
Private insurance covered 207 million Americans, with total spending of $1.47 trillion or $7,065 per person, an 11.5% rise from the prior year’s spending. Medicare had 65.1 million beneficiaries, cost $1.03 trillion or $15,808 per person, an 8.1% increase from 2022. And Medicaid covered an astounding 91.7 million people at a cost of $872 billion, $9,502 per covered person a rise of 7.9%. (HA Article)
If you looking for where to cut government spending, it is the abuse of Social Security disability to get Medicare coverage. And that Medicaid number of covered people is absurd. Medicaid is part federal and part state spending. I think serious consideration should be given to just making this a state-only program. States vary extensively in who they cover, what they cover and how much they pay for services. There are a lot of illegal aliens in this program as well. If California wants to spend billions on their care, let their taxpayers suffer, not federal ones. And don’t tell me that the Federal program isn’t paying or subsidizing this coverage. Putting the program back in state hands would force them to get more efficient and be more careful about who and what they cover and dealing with fraud and waste.
