WASHINGTON — For all the hue and cry over a government takeover of health care, it’s happening anyway.
Federal and state programs will pay slightly more than half the tab for health care purchased in the United States by 2012, says a report by Medicare number-crunchers released early today.
That’s even if President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul wastes away in congressional limbo. Long in coming, the shift to a health care sector dominated by government is being speeded up by the deep economic recession and the aging of the baby boomers, millions of whom will soon start signing up for Medicare.
“This does mark a pretty stark jump in the data,” said Christopher Truffer of Medicare’s Office of the Actuary, which prepared the analysis published in the journal Health Affairs.
The tipping point is likely to come next year, Truffer said. Richard Foster, Medicare’s top economic forecaster, said the recession has only worsened the two stubborn problems facing the U.S. health care system: lack of insurance coverage and high costs.
“All that argues that some form of health care reform is a good idea,” Foster said.
The report estimated that in 2009, the United States spent $2.5 trillion for health care, with government programs — mainly Medicare and Medicaid — paying $1.2 trillion.
Employer health insurance and various private sources covered the remaining $1.3 trillion. Even as the economy shrank because of the downturn, health care spending grew by 5.7 percent from 2008. Spending by government grew nearly three times as fast as private spending, closing in to overtake it.
Driving much of the government surge was Medicaid, the federal-state program for low-income people, which grew by nearly 10 percent as workers lost jobs with health insurance and Democrats expanded coverage for children of the working poor.
Previous estimates had put the crossover point to a health care system financed mainly by taxpayers at about 2016.
