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20 November 2020

U.S. Government Health Care Spending v. Military Spending

On Facebook, I recently saw the claim that:
Our taxes do not go for healthcare. Our taxes go for a bloated military complex that wages war on others.
My response was as follows (edited for this post which has more formatting flexibility such as the ability to use paragraph breaks):
We spend a lot more than we should on the military, but you are incorrect. 
Medicare ($644 billion/yr) paid for with payroll taxes and general purpose federal taxes, the combined state and federal Medicaid spending ($603 billion/yr) paid for with general purpose federal, state and local taxes, VA health care benefits ($76 billion/yr) paid for with general purpose federal taxes, and Obamacare tax credits ($52 billion/yr) which reduce federal tax revenues and are financed in part with an Obamacare tax on investment income, for a combined $1,285 billion/yr of the main line items of taxpayer funded government health care spending.

There are also other amounts. There are a few smaller state and local government health care programs and about $188+ billion of other health care related tax breaks. And, there is considerable spending on health care for current local, state and federal government employees (about one in seven U.S. employees in all). 

All of these figures exclude expenditures and tax breaks for medical research and charitable deductions for health care related non-profits.

Total taxpayer funded spending on health care exceeds the combined U.S. military and intelligence agency budgets and non-health care VA budget of about $740 billion/year, and is almost twice as large. 

Advocates often misleadingly look only at federal discretionary spending on health care (excluding Medicare, many VA benefits, tax expenditures, government employee benefits, and state Medicaid spending) to make the amount of tax dollars spend on health care look smaller than the defense budget (almost all of which is discretionary federal spending). But mandatory and discretionary spending at both the federal level and the state and local level is paid for with tax dollars.

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