Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Guide the people by law, subdue them by punishment; they may shun crime, but will be void of shame. Guide them by example, subdue them by courtesy; they will learn shame, and come to be good. Confucius. HT: John Kay’s Other People’s Money: The Real Business of Finance.
In the U.S., the answer is largely the government. An NBER paper by Mariacristina De Nardi, Eric French, John Bailey Jones, and Jeremy McCauley provide some helpful statistics using data from 1996 to 2010 waves of the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS). The government pays for two-thirds of health care spending by the elderly, with Medicare…