There are no countries where all health-related services, including optical and dental services, drugs, and long-term care, are entirely free to patients without co-pays or deductibles.
.. deductions and exclusions of health insurance premiums and related tax breaks cost the federal government some $250 billion in revenue in 2015 — a substantial burden on the federal budget.
.. If we categorize healthcare expenditures according to the ultimate source of funds rather than the primary payer, we find that government budgets account for over half of all spending, as this chart shows:
.. The individual insurance market is failing because too large a share of health care risks is inherently uninsurable. Two conditions must hold for a real insurance market to work. First, the risks in question must be fortuitous; that is, predictable statistically but not predictable for any particular individual.
.. the top 10 percent of households account for two-thirds of all personal healthcare spending, and the top 5 percent for half of all spending. The majority of these high spenders have one or more chronic conditions that keep their spending high year after year.
.. Ultimately, though, guaranteed issue is an unsustainable policy that threatens the whole individual insurance market with a “death spiral.”
.. economists believe that over time, employees end up bearing the cost of healthcare benefits through lower pay. Rising employer healthcare costs are thus a major contributor to the stagnation of wages.
.. from 1999 to 2014, the share of the nonelderly population covered by employer-sponsored insurance fell from 67 percent to 56 percent.
.. Even with the greatest administrative energy behind it, it would be hard to make the ACA’s private insurance market work well, and it is more likely that current administrators will work to undermine than to support its operation.