Secret Solution to US Deficits Hiding in Plain Sight

Congress isn't expected to take action on it. Only candidate Ron Paul thinks it is the number one issue. Washington is in general content to postpone the issue until after the next election. But the $5 trillion dollar increase in US government debt over four years, one year from now puts us only a whisper from the same relative level of national debt as bankrupt Greece. Central to the issue is the growing cost of providing healthcare. The US is the most inefficient country in healthcare spending vs. outcomes in the world as the two graphs below show.

US Healthcare Spending is $1 Trillion Too High
Health care costs are now about 18% of our total economy. The reasons for overspending come down to payment processing, higher drug costs than any country, costs associated with paying for and avoiding lawsuits, allowing costs like end of life care to balloon out of control and a complicated system of essential services that have no overall cost/outcome standards.

If President Obama does lose in November, it may be because of that moment where his administration pushed as hard as they could to reform healthcare without designing in credible cost controls. The impact of this problem is not only a much larger deficit but also in the workplace where health insurance costs make it just that much harder to hire workers.

If Obama had pushed a plan that lowered the cost of health care, arguably the deficits in the US would be half or less what they are both due to cost cuts and increased hiring and increased tax revenues. If the US spent the same as Germany per person on healthcare,  we would save $1trillion dollars a year, our deficit would not be a life or death issue and economic growth would be on sounder footing.