Hope and Fail

Health care presser lies, Pt. 10: Americans spend $6,000 more on coverage

President Obama said Americans spend $6,000 more than other developed countries on health care, when actually, Americans spend about … $6,000 total on health care.

Here’s what he said:

We also know that health care inflation on the curve that it’s on, we’re guaranteed to see Medicare and Medicaid basically break the federal budget. And we know that we’re spending — on average we, here in the United States, are spending about $6,000 more than other advanced countries where they’re just as healthy.

And I’ve said this before, if you found out that your neighbor had gotten the same car for $6,000 less, you’d want to figure out how to get that deal. And that’s what reform is all about. How can we make sure that we are getting the best bang for our health care dollar.

According to the Congressional Budget Office (Obama’s favorite office right now, to be sure) said the average American spent about $6,000 total on health care in 2007.

As Philip Klein put it:

While it’s true that Americans pay more than any other country, the actual health care costs per person in the U.S. were about $6,000 in 2007, according to a CBO report. So for Obama’s claim to be true — that is, that other countries are spending $6,000 less, on average — you’d have to believe that it costs every other advanced country zero dollars to provide all of their citizens with health care.

According to FactCheck.org, the White House is claiming the president was using numbers based on per family costs, but even then the numbers don’t add up:

The OMB official said the administration multiplied the per-capita spending by 3.3 to get a family figure (roughly the average number of persons living in family households). This yields closer to an $8,000 difference than $6,000, however, so we’re still unsure of how Obama got his figure. In any case, using a per-family figure without identifying it as such is misleading, since millions of Americans live alone, and per-capita spending is the standard used for making such comparisons.

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