Another good article, this one from the NY Times, details again our wasteful government spending on health care by funneling billions through business tax breaks.
The article is here for the next week or so.
A neat graphic is here.
The figures are high: 130 billion or so in federal dollars spent through these tax cuts.
By comparison, Illinois will spend 45 million on the AllKids program to extend health insurance to 250,000 children through a direct program.
If the government simply ran one large health insurance system, like Medicaid, and abandoned the wasteful method of running money through private businesses to buy health insurance for their employees from another private business, we'd get the job done much more efficiently.
I guess a strained analogy would be if we decided to finance our national guard through private businesses instead of just hiring guardsmen and buying equipment -- each business would get a tax break for every guardsman they employed and if we ended up with far fewer guardsmen then we need, well, maybe we'd just have bigger tax breaks to induce more businesses to provide jobs for guardsmen instead of just hiring them directly.
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