Here's a chart for all the Republicans proposing turning Medicare into a voucher system and gutting Medicaid (which is pretty much all of them):
Yep, that's Medicare and Medicaid performing wildly better than private insurance in
holding down the increase in spending.
The Federal Office of the Actuary in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has charted the annual rate of increase in spending for Medicare, Medicaid, and private health insurance. As the chart above shows, by cumulative growth in per capita spending, Medicare and Medicaid have generally grown more slowly than private insurance and are projected to continue doing so through 2023. Per capita spending is an especially useful measure for comparing public and private health insurance spending because it shows how much Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers spend on each person irrespective of the number of people covered.
Just to emphasize, this is spending
per capita, comparing covering the elderly and disabled and low income people—generally a more expensive group to take care of—versus everyone else with coverage. Public heath coverage is more efficient, and cheaper, than private insurance. That's not really news, you only have to look at where the U.S. ranks compared to other developed nations which all have some variety of single-payer healthcare system. We're consistently
dead last on outcomes and first in spending.
That's the system Republicans want to see swallow up Medicare and Medicaid—the system that costs us far more and keeps us sicker. Is it time for more healthcare reform? For Medicare for all? Yes, it is indeed.