Persuasive Essay Healthcare

420 Words2 Pages

Healthcare is a big problem in America. Americans annually spend about $2.8 trillion on healthcare. We pay 17.7% of the economy when other countries spend about 8.9%-11.6% this includes Australia, UK, Canada, Germany, and France. The US has a mostly private healthcare system. We manage to spend more on public healthcare system then countries where the healthcare system is entirely public. The US spends so much money on healthcare because we have to pay from prescription drugs to x rays and imaging scans. Nearly everything cost more when its prescribed in America. In other countries, they have price controls that the government negotiates but in America it leaves the negotiations up to the individual insurers. The US pays a higher price to subsidize …show more content…

We have a “fee-for-service” system which is basically for every service a doctor provides they typically get a large amount of the money. American doctors are paid based on if they do the surgery or not, they don't get paid on the outcome of the patients surgery. Obamacare is doing little experiments in the medicare program to pay doctors more when they provide a higher quality care. Half of all healthcare spendings goes towards five percent of the population. In 2009 about half of health spending ($623 billion) five percent went towards the population. The lower-spending populations nearly spend $236 per person. The people spending most on healthcare are the older people and the people with chronic conditions instead of the people with more money. “The 1954 Internal Revenue Service Tax Code is the document in which the federal government codified into law that companies can provide health insurance benefits to workers tax-free. This affirmed a 1943 IRS tax court ruling that had also decreed health benefits to be non-taxable.” This means that the people that don't have to pay any taxes don't have to pay for health insurance and the non-taxable have to pay but not that much. The government loses out on aout $260 billion annually by not taxing health benefits. The majority of americans that work get their health insurance from