The New York Times had an article on health care today.

The article in the Times was on how caring for their parents is a financial burden to many Americans. I thought I would give you some general background on the issue of health care in America.

Do you know what percentage of our gross domestic product that is spent on health care? 16%.

Do you know how much of that amount is spent on administration (essentially billing)? 33%.

Do you know how many Americans are uninsured? The answer is 29%. 15.7% are totally uninsured and 12.9% are on Medicaid. So, really only 45.8 million are totally uninsured.

We spend 16% of the largest GDP in the world to not insure 45 million of our population. This is not really astounding unless you compare it to another country. So let’s do that.

Do you know what percent of Sweden’s GDP is spent on health care? 7%. They insure their entire population and no one is arguing that their health care is not good. In fact, it is very good.

I know, you are thinking the same thing I was. We are spending almost the same percentage of our GDP on administration as Sweden spends on their entire health care system.

But let’s look at the bright side. We manage to not insure 45 million people for that extra 9% of our GDP that we spend. So we have that going for us.