In Stark Reality - Aaron Carroll of The Incidental Economist Presents This Graph on Health Care Costs

A Very Few People Cause Most of the Spending

Writing in his excellent blog The Incidental Economist Aaron Carroll alerts everyone to the following graph.




What does it show?  It shows that most of the health care spending is done by a very few people, people who have health care issues that are very, very, very, very expensive to treat.  50% of the population uses $36 billion of health care and the other 50% uses $1.223 trillion of health care.

The economics of the situation is clear.

1.  We have to determine ways to provide less expensive but equally effective treatment for those who need the very expensive part of health care.

2.  We need to find ways to prevent those who do not need very expensive health care from having to need very expensive health care in the future.

Anyone see how making individuals purchase private insurance on their own will accomplish these two objectives?  Anyone?