Of the nearly $3.5 trillion annually collected in total state, federal and local tax revenues about $1.2 trillion of the $2 trillion spent annually in the US on health care is funded by the government. The 60% of the total annual spending on health care in the US that is government funded pays for medicare, medicaid, the VA, the Indian Health Service, health insurance for government employees and for some private sector employees working for firms with extensive government contracts as well as tax deductions for health care costs. More than one third of tax revenues collected annually go to pay for health care in the US.

The share and amount of income annually going to health care through taxes alone is slightly progressive with those earning $75,000 annually paying about 11% of their income to government health costs and those earning only $25,000 paying about 9%. What is so unjust about this is that so many people at or below the median income have no access to health care despite paying these costs. When the share and amount of total income paid by households with insurance is calculated, the share of income paid in taxes and private insurance premiums becomes steeply regressive with over 37% of income being paid by households earning around $25,000 annually, over 26% for the earning $50,000 and around 22% for those earning $75,000. The further up the income scale the lower the portion of income paid for health care costs.

This doesn't account for all the out of pocket expenses and co-payments of various types nor for those things no covered by the health insurance policy at all. Half of all consumer bankruptcies in the US are caused by high outstanding medical bills. The current fragmented system is costly in terms of administrative waste and high CEO salaries. We need single payer health care now. We're already paying for it with the current cost inefficient system which excludes increasing numbers of people every year.

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As an added complication to the healthcare problems and cost, a virtually invisible factor must be included. Up to 35% of all healthcare costs are very closely related to chemical misuse, dependency, and genetically based addiction. The major portion of these costs remain hidden due to the history of the insurance industry to deny payment or not include adequate coverage. All too frequently, mental health problems involve self-medication with alcohol and illicit chemicals. Here again, is an area that insurance companies are not prone to cover well. The reason: Past experience has shown no clearly identifiable savings and this is a very correct assumption. When we consider that, up to now, the vast majority of "Substance Abuse Treatment Programs" have been using a far too much of an anecdotal approach and little more than a psychosocial model of a 12-Step program as treatment. Long-term outcomes have been very poor and little better than simply getting detoxified and going to some 12-Step program like AA or NA as was done prior to the advent of some measure of formal treatment. Very few treatment programs do long-term outcome studies. Up to 76% of treatment has fallend in to the taxpayer funded "Community Based Treatment Programs." They are historically underfunded with the majority of funding going to the "War on Drugs."
Although there are no accurate statistics that could be termed reliable regarding 12-Step long-term success, it has been estimated as being little better than 15% to 20%. This is about what I suspect would be the outcomes, if studies were done of the Community Based Programs.The cost to healthcare remains hidden in the form of overall general poor health habits, accidents not reported as alcohol or other chemical self-medication related, etc. If accurately reported as alcohol or chemical misuse related, most healthcare policies would not cover the treatment costs. It represents unwise "game-playing" that quality, evidence based, alcohol and chemical dependency treatment should have been dealing with as far back as the 1980s when the insurance industry was forced into managed care. My forecast for the here and now, made in 1986 has been manifested as forecasted. The entire mental health and addictions treatment industry is just now pushing to provide science based (evidence based) treatment that the National Neuroscience and Addictions Research Foundation was calling for back in 1986. The "War on Drugs," and far too much general apathy since then, has put mental health and addictions treatment far behind in the ability to effectively utilize the current scientific
technologies that are rapidly developing within the genetic, epigenetic, and neuroscientific studies fields.The current estimate of $800 billion per year in Gross Domestic Product that can be tied to alcohol and other chemical misuse will very likely dissapear from our economy at a rapid pace when the current use of neuropsychopharmacological products and proposed genetic engineering and actual genetic cures for mental health and chemical misuse are elevated to higher levels of practical use. This must be taken into consideration when looking at any healthcare reforms. If not, our healthcare problems and cost will never be effectively addressed.

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IF YOU HEARD OF A COUNTRY that in 1995 introduced single-payer universal health care, with complete freedom of choice of doctors and no waiting lists, you would expect all the presidential contenders to be beating a path there to find out what was happening. After all, this is not Shangri-la. It is Taiwan, which also offers dental and prescription-drug coverage, and the choice between Chinese traditional or modern medicine, all for just over a third of the proportion of the GDP that the U.S. "system" costs.

But none of the last three remaining major presidential candidates mentioned this highly successful Taiwanese experiment. Indeed, all of them ruled out any single-payer system. To sharpen the irony, the designers of the Taiwanese system scoured the globe for a model, and in the end adopted what they thought was the most promising system to emulate—Medicare in the U.S.A.!
The reason for this political omerta is that ALL THE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES WANT TO APPEASE THE INSURANCE COMPANIES, under whose lobbying aegis the U.S. spends 16 percent of GDP on a health-care "system" that leaves 45 million uninsured and countless millions more underinsured.
The moral of this story is; OBAMA IS A PUPPET BOY!!!!

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All the discussion I read and hear about the health care dilemma pretty much avoids the obvious cause of the problem. It is the hugely expensive type of medical treatment and drug barrage that the words "health care" denote in the U.S.

Other countries almost universally include a variety of options in their covered health care - from traditional and herbal remedies to homeopathy,acupuncture, etc. They also almost all have far lower costs - and far better health results. Our high-tech, high-drug dependent, high-cost system kills or sickens large numbers of people, while less risky, less expensive and, often, proven effective alternatives are excluded from the mix.

Unfortunately, the pharmaceutical, chemical and other corporations profiting from the present state of affairs pretty much control the government, so we won't have any significant improvement until the level of bankruptcy and untreated or exacerbated illness becomes a tide that can't be ignored.

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a list of the food and non-prescription medicines you buy to the health insurance companies to adjust your rates to ensure profits. Safeway -it said in the Bottom Line- is the only one they know of where you can be an "anonymous" customer.

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