Comment by JumpCrisscross
9 hours ago
Note that the DHS budget ($100bn) is sufficient to provide healthcare to every uninsured child, and about half (EDIT: a third) of what it would cost to provide universal healthcare to every American under 18 at the CMS average rate.
At the end of the day this sort of wastefulness eventually attracts attention.
Medicare alone costs $1.21 Trillion, I find that extremely hard to believe.
> Medicare alone costs $1.21 Trillion
To cover 70.5 million seniors [1]. $17k per senior.
“Per person personal health care spending for the 65 and older population was $22,356 in 2020, over 5 times higher than spending per child ($4,217) and almost 2.5 times the spending per working-age person ($9,154)” [2].
80 million under 19 [3] at that rate comes to about $400bn. And most efficiency estimates would take at least a third off that when we eliminate redundant billing processes.
Given 6% of children lack health insurance, we could cover them for about $24bn. Less than Trump’s war in Iran has cost [4].
[1] https://data.cms.gov/summary-statistics-on-beneficiary-enrol...
[2] https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-repo...
[3] https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-repo...
[4] https://www.aecf.org/blog/uninsured-children-in-america