> Health insurance is orthogonal to federal spending.
As an Australian looking at the USA - I'm not sure how you make that claim sincerely.
Perhaps you're constraining it specifically to 'insurance', rather than the only slightly broader question of private health coverage. It still feels like a tenuous claim, given parent's valid point about health costs at the federal level, and intimation around the poor comparison to almost all the other advanced nation states on the planet.
> Be honest and say why shouldn't corporations pay more. The answer to that is it's an inefficient way of taxing the wealthy ...
You seem to be conflating corporations with wealthy people.
Taxing corporations more has been shown - in your country, albeit some decades ago - to be both eminently achievable and effective.
Taxing corporations less has, in recent years, demonstrated clearly how poor a decision that is.
> Perhaps you're constraining it specifically to 'insurance', rather than the only slightly broader question of private health coverage
Correct. Our major uses of our $4.9tn of annual healthcare funds are 31% to hospital care, 20% to physician and clinical services and 9% to retail prescription drugs [1]. Lowering that number begins and ends with better price transparency from and efficiency in hospitals and physicians' practices.
Our sources of funds are private health insurance (30%), Medicare (21%), Medicaid (18%) and out-of-pocket (10%). Within the context of federal spending, Medicare and Medicaid are relevant, as well as the price and utilisation of the aforementioned uses.
> You seem to be conflating corporations with wealthy people
I'm specifically saying these are separate, and that taxing the latter would strike me as fairer than raising taxes on McDonalds franchisees.
> Our major uses of our $4.9tn of annual healthcare funds are 31% to hospital care, 20% to physician and clinical services and 9% to retail prescription drugs.
The adjacent 'National Health Expenditures by type of service and source of funds, CY 1960-2023' paints this picture more clearly, and identifies $1.5T of that $4.9T as going to 'private health insurance'.
It's odd that you overlooked that 30% figure in your summary of major uses (or 'wealthy corporate parasitic recipients', in this case).
I think it's this bit that everyone outside of the USA can't understand the high tolerance for.
> I'm specifically saying these are separate, and that taxing the latter would strike me as fairer than raising taxes on McDonalds franchisees.
Perhaps, but perhaps try both? Anyway, as I said, the USA used to have high corporate tax rates - up until Reagan, I believe - and almost every graph showing something awful happening in the USA at some point in the past 80 years has a suspiciously consistent inflection point of Reagan. [0]
I mention this only as it relates to any proposal to reinstate higher corporate taxes. I don't think anyone's suggesting chasing large numbers of (likely already acceptably taxed) $500k franchisees are the place to focus on. I don't understand why you would assume that's what I meant.
Between 2011 and 2020, Amazon, Facebook, Alphabet (the owner of Google),
Netflix, Apple and Microsoft — known as the "Silicon Six" — paid roughly
$219 billion in income taxes, which amounts to just 3.6% of their $6
trillion-plus in total revenue. [1]
Select the fourth download - as noted above - called "National Health Expenditures by type of service and source of funds, CY 1960-2023 (ZIP)"
I opened the .xlsx, but they ship a csv too. The xlsx file shows on line 6 'Private Health Insurance' - and this is under the sub-heading 'Total National Health Expenditure', itself in the column called 'Expenditure Amount (Millions)'.
I've re-visited your earlier link - https://www.cms.gov/files/document/highlights.pdf - and can't see anything - especially 'top of the second paragraph' that tries to explain that figure differently.
In any case, the full ledger has a lot more clarity.
(Oh, in your highlights document - on page three - there's a 'Health Spending by Major Sources of Funds' - but I note that it's Health Spending they're describing there.)
As an Australian looking at the USA - I'm not sure how you make that claim sincerely.
Perhaps you're constraining it specifically to 'insurance', rather than the only slightly broader question of private health coverage. It still feels like a tenuous claim, given parent's valid point about health costs at the federal level, and intimation around the poor comparison to almost all the other advanced nation states on the planet.
> Be honest and say why shouldn't corporations pay more. The answer to that is it's an inefficient way of taxing the wealthy ...
You seem to be conflating corporations with wealthy people.
Taxing corporations more has been shown - in your country, albeit some decades ago - to be both eminently achievable and effective.
Taxing corporations less has, in recent years, demonstrated clearly how poor a decision that is.