First a minor one: the line in you graph showing OECD average is vertical, not horizontal (as the caption says.)
Second, Services Annual Survey shows the source of income for various fields in the NAICS industry 62 (health) including Medicare/Medicaid (MM), private insurance and patient payments. http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/services.html
The data are not very user friendly and require some calculations to get the totals, but for one of my projects I calculated the shares of health business income received from MM, private insurance and patient for 1998 and 2004. MM share remained almost the same 39% in 1998 and 38% in 2004, and so did patient payments (12%). Insurance payments went up a bit from 34% to 37%. Needless to say that overall revenue increased from about $939 billion to about $1.4 trillion, at the annual rate of about 6.7%.
The way I read these figures is that both patients and insurance plans (both private and govt) pay more for health care instead of cost being shifted on one party. If there is any cost shifting, it is mainly to private insurance, while MM keeps their share of cost constant. This is an argument that MM is slightly better than private insurance to resist medical inflation, but neither is very effective at that.
As you say, National Income and Product Accounts treat MM (an private insurance payments) as purchases by the household sector, which makes it difficult to compare their relative shares of health expenditures. However, they do give you government expenditures by function (NIPA Table 3.16 http://www.bea.gov/National/nipaweb/SelectTable.asp?Selected=N currently not available online) which allow calculations of the annual rate of increase in these expenditures. General government expenditures on health were rising at the annual rate of about 6.5% (inflation adjusted) between 1960 amd 2007, while the other functions were growing at much slower rates e.g. housing and community development - 4.4%, education 3.6%, income security -- 3.4% percent.
The bottom line is that health care costs are rising more than any other costs and everybody is paying more - not just government or private insurance. That may be consistent with the overconsumption argument, but it does not indicate the causes of that overconsumption i.e. whether it is on the demand or the supply side, or perhaps both.
Wojtek
On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 4:32 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Oct 6, 2009, at 4:21 PM, James Heartfield wrote:
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> I belive that Britain spends about half what the US spends on health.
>>
>
> Almost - about 9% of GDP for the UK vs. 17% for the US. See graph at bottom
> of:
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> <http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Consumption.html>.
>
> Doug
>
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