What Canada Can Teach Us About Fixing Medicare
What Canada Can Teach Us About Fixing Medicare
There are a lot of big differences between health care in the United States and Canada. But when you look at how the two countries provide care for the elderly, it’s actually pretty similar. Both countries run an insurance plan for those over 64 that covers a defined set of benefits.
Canada has managed to provide those benefits, however, for a whole lot less. In this week’s Archives of Internal Medicine, David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler look at the growth of spending on the elderly in the United States and Canada. It finds that, for the over 64 population, both in government programs, Medicare spending has grown significantly faster in the United States than in Canada.
Back in 1980, Medicare spent an average of $1,215 on each beneficiary. In Canada, that number stood at $2,141. The difference largely had to do with the level of benefits: Canadian health insurance covers about 80 percent of seniors’ medical costs, whereas Medicare covers about half. (More than 40 percent of Medicare beneficiaries will spend all assets on out-of-pocket costs during the last five years of life, according to one study.)
Since then, United States per capita spending has grown three times as quickly as it has in Canada. Here’s what that looks like in graph form, using data from the Himmelstein and Woolhandler study: