We have extracted information from US Government-provided per capita health care expenditure data for 2004.

It is true that total spending by the government should be expected to rise faster than total spending by private providers as the well meaning, but inefficient government undertakes providing health care to groups of people who were not previously being provided for.  However, these data are per capita, that is spending per individual.  Again it is true that the government will take on the poorest, with the least healthy lifestyles and so forth, so that as these groups are added to the public burden, we should expect a somewhat faster growth rate for public spending than for private.  But the government’s performance is nowhere near the performance of private business. As the bottom growth rate table (between 1987 and 2004) shows, per-individual spending by the government on all groups grew by a factor of 3.3X, while spending per-individual by private insurance providers grew by 2.7X.  This means the government’s spending per individual grew at a 22.2% faster rate than private spending over the period.

For example, the government has set out to provide health care to poor children. Total spending on the age 0 to 18  group by the government has grown from about $15B in 1987 to about $85B in 2004.  Government spending on this group rose from about 25% of the total public and private spending to 41% during this time.  So how efficient was this spending?  Well… per individual  it grew faster than even spending on old people – by a factor of 5.1X (compared to the growth factor for private spending on kids of 2.4X).  Thus, the government’s own data show that government-run health care will not slow the rise in health care spending — total spending on health care will grow much faster if we let the government run it.