Feds Spent $9 on Defense for Every $1 on Healthcare 50 Years Ago

Anyone over the age of 30 has lived through a rather profound shift in federal priorities.

A half-century ago, defense accounted for 45 percent of federal outlays at $405 billion. Medicare and health, combining for $45 billion, constituted five percent of the budget. Granted, the budget disparity occurred at the peak of the Vietnam War. But a review of federal budgets during non-war postwar years generally shows defense dwarfing health-related expenses.

The entity eating up the largest portion of the federal budget remains the well-fed Department of Health and Human Services, which devours roughly $1.1 trillion. Social Security ($1 trillion), Defense and the Veterans Administration ($900 billion), and the catchall category “everything else” ($1 trillion) each account for a smaller piece of the federal pie.

This shift occurred relatively recently. But even in the pre-Obamacare days during the Iraq War in 2009, spending on health-related expenses eclipsed spending on the Department of Defense and War on Terror expenses.

This trend encompasses not just the federal government. At the state and local level, governments spend more on health and hospitals than every other category save education.

Despite government spending more on healthcare than any other category, individuals continue to spend increasing amounts of their after-tax, personal income on medicine. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we spend more at the individual level on healthcare than anything save for housing, food, transportation, and insurance (including Social Security). This seems unremarkable until one grasps that employers and government combine to provide health coverage to about 95 percent of Americans. When combined with government, employer, and all other spending on healthcare, the annual figure we all spend on healthcare exceeds $10,000 per person.

In 1970, we spent about one in fourteen dollars on healthcare. Today, we spend almost one in five.

Medicare and Medicaid were just getting started up. And of course, there are newer valuable treatments that are nonetheless, very expensive.Finally, the population as a whole is older, so healthcare costs more now, and the government pays half of the health bills.

Our expenditures also change their shape when we fight different types of wars now, and the U.S.S.R. isn’t the same type of threat it was at the time.

RE: Does the Constitution talk about healthcare? No?

Pretty sure it does talk about Defense.

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Everything is now lumped under the “General Welfare” clause.

IT SAYS IN Article I Sec. 8.:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States;

Politicians deciding that government must throw money at an industry - the health care industrial complex - because its prices are too expensive for too many people (so the argument goes), does not bring down the prices that industry is charging, it makes more price increases inevitable, because the government largess withdraws and restrains natural market forces from their roles in restraining costs.

You can easily see the same affect as it played out over the last several decades with the cost of a college education.

Heck in those days you could afford decent care even if middle class. I remember breaking an arm and my parents being pissed that it cost $400 or so, a good chunk of money back in 69; nowadays if an 8 year old went for a broken arm it would be far more than the inflation adjusted cost.

OF course a great part of that is that we have a bloated hospital/insurance system sucking down medicare/medicade dollars; and it’s kind of ‘funny money’ since the hospital will charge different insurers different amounts, but I don’t think a civil servant (mom) and disabled retired army(dad) could write a check for a broken arm these days.

One thing that I think we might need to take into account, in comparing defense vs general health:
in 1790, you, me and four average Freepers could outfit ourselves with equipment equal to anything the best soldiers in the world could come at us with (excluding naval cannon) - state of the art rifles, maybe kick in on a cannon. Train for a few months and the advantage of knowing the ground would make use the equal of the best British or French troops. Today, I doubt that any six of us, even with an open tab at Cabella’s, would stand much chance against Seal Team 6 with some drones, FLIR, attack helicopters and other esoteric gear. In the same way, back then, an honest blacksmith could get pretty much the same healthcare as Ben Franklin or George Washington, and pay for it; nowadays I doubt there are few people who could just write a check for a heart transplant, bypass or neurosurgery. I’m not sure what needs to be done, personally if there had been no insurance or government intervention the market would have rationalized things, but something needs to be done, the people simply will not put up with ‘let the poor die’, the Democrats do and will use that to political ends, and I’m not sure I’m comfortable with having to watch a family member die due to being unable to afford something that another person has access to out mere circumstance of birth or luck. It’s not like a fancy car or house to a lot of people.... no real answer...

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