The Ignorant Investor

I never paid much attention to healthcare, but take a worker with a  salary of $50,000 per year, about the median for the United States.  To pay for his or her family at a fake company I'm making up (not the one I work for, naturally, because I would never want to discuss my own job environment), premiums total around $7,800 per year.  The cost of the medicare tax for this worker, in essence, his share of the total cost of keeping the sickly aged alive for another year, is around $720.   That means that the worker's total expenditure on our healthcare system is around $7,500, or about 17% of this worker's paycheck.

This level of expenditure essentially constitutes a second tax burden that is as high as the worker's  federal income tax burden.  That's money that is pulled from workers' pockets and given to healthcare executives, doctors, and shareholders (yes, workers are employed by the system, too, but a lot of them are not any better paid than other workers and have the same problem of high health insurance premiums). That can't be healthy for the economy, but all we get from politicians is a shrug.

Whatever it takes, the cost of healthcare needs to be reduced.  Between healthcare and the high cost of housing, huge chunks of income are being taken out of workers' pockets from the moment they earn money.  That money won't be spent in the economy to improve demand for other goods and services.  It flows into the hands of healthcare corporation CEOs, highly paid skilled healthcare workers, and shareholders who are, if the economic situation over the past 10 years is any gauge,  are not using it in a way that has not benefited the wider economy.

We've tried this system of giving money to management and the professional classes under the assumption that  redistributing it to workers via either higher wages or direct taxation would kill the competitiveness of the economy.  We were promised that freeing up capital would increase the wealth of both executives and workers.  But it didn't work.  The promise went unfulfilled.  Time for a different approach.

I wonder if medicare was expanded to cover everyone, whether I would pay more or less than $7,500 for healthcare?  Because I suspect  I wouldn't lose in such a system.