How Europeanizing Our Healthcare Could Cut Our Deficit

Ezra Klein over at the Washington Post -- his new home, since he ended blogging at The American Prospect -- uses data from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) to show how much money we could save if we adopted European models of health insurance: meaning single-payer or heavily-regulated private insurance companies competing with a government plan:




The orange line is the projected deficit of our country. The other lines are projected deficits if we adopted those countries' healthcare systems.

This is why the canard about how universal care would be require gross tax increases and end up costing us all a lot more just isn't true -- if care is delivered through more efficient government insurance plans, we're actually cutting costs, and that will go a huge way in cutting our deficit.