A casual listener to the health care debate listening to caricatured portrayals of the health care systems in the US and abroad could be forgiven for thinking that the US has a model that is exclusively privately-run while all others are government-operated. Via Ezra Klein comes this report from the Kaiser Family Foundation which shows this isn't even remotely close to being true:
In fact, government spending accounted for 46.5 percent of all health care spending in the US in 2008. As can be seen from this graph, the US government spends a greater percentage of its GDP on health care than Canada and the UK despite the fact that both have "single-payer" systems. A free market fantasyland the US is not.
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