RealTime Economic Issues Watch
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RealTime Economic Issues Watch

In RealTime posts, PIIE senior staff and colleagues discuss the fast-moving economic news, financial developments, and public policy choices confronting the United States and the world.

Archive: Posts Tagged ‘health care’

Europe and the US: Whose Health Care is More Socialist?

by Jacob Funk Kirkegaard | April 6th, 2009 | 10:34 am

Whenever reform of health care is discussed in America, the argument that “America rejects socialized medicine” is heard in many quarters. Superficially, the facts suggest that the private sector has always accounted for the majority of healthcare expenditure in the United States (approximately 55 percent of total expenditures since the early 1990s1) and that private [...]

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What Comparing Healthcare Costs Really Reveals

by Jacob Funk Kirkegaard | March 10th, 2009 | 09:49 am

It is common knowledge that the cost of Medicare and Medicaid will grow to become an unsustainably large part of the US federal budget in coming decades. Perhaps less well known is that more than 80 percent of the projected increases derive from “excess cost growth,” unrelated to expansion in coverage or the effects of [...]

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