Daniel Gross writes in today’s New York Times that after looking at the numbers, we tax payers already pay for healthcare for about half of all U.S. workers. Is this right? He explains:

Out of a total population of about 300 million, 35.6 million elderly Americans were on Medicare in 2005. Of the working-age population, which reached 257.8 million in 2005, some 45.5 million were covered by Medicare, Medicaid or military health programs, according to the benefits institute. An additional 18.2 million workers had health insurance through jobs in the public sector, which includes state, federal and local governments, public schools and state universities, according to Paul Fronstin, director of the institute’s health research and education program. Millions of those workers’ dependents are covered as well. Even if those dependents are not included in the tally, taxpayers paid the bill for almost two-fifths of all Americans with insurance in 2005.

The more intriguing number to wrap your mind around is the unspoken tax subsidy that is in place. Health benefits are a form of compensation, but they are not taxed. The third factoid that bears scrutiny is that when you total up all these federal expenditures, at least according to the experts quoted by Gross,

The government spends money as if there were a national health insurance program. In 2004, government spending on health care equaled 9.6 percent of the gross domestic product, compared with 6.9 percent in Canada, which has a single-payer universal health care program, said David Himmelstein, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. And yet some significant components of federal support are not efficient methods of providing health insurance to the people who most need it. Higher-income workers are likely to have higher rates of coverage, higher premiums and higher taxes, all of which means that the tax break for compensation disproportionately helps the well-off.

“We’re paying for national health insurance, but we’re not getting it,”� Dr. Himmelstein added.

So if the numbers don’t lie, the arguments for or against federalized healthcare are somewhat false. The better argument would be how to make what federal dollars we do spend obtain better results.

New York Times National Health Care? We’re Halfway There By DANIEL GROSS Published: December 3, 2006