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It is a tad misleading. Not all of that is technically spent on health care costs. Health and human services encompass a lot of areas.
The CDC and FDA fall under that part of the budget, which are two massive divisions of Health and Humans Services. Medical research grants for areas like cancer, HIV, and other diseases are given from this budget. The ACF handles child support enforcement, adoptions, foster care, and child abuse protection. The National Institute of Health falls under this department and handle a huge amount of biomedical research. Besides working on diseases, they run things like the human genome project and the National Library of Medicine. The Corps of Public Health house the Surgeon General and play vital roles in disease prevention as well as providing medical personnel and scientists for disasters in this country.
What I'm saying is that all that spending isn't for health insurance for people. A lot of shit falls under that department. Medicare/Medicaid does too, and is a big chunk of that budget. If we didn't have a government who let the drug companies write the Prescription Drug plan, we may not have spent that much. Nonetheless, Medicare is paid in part by taxes we have specifically set aside. It's in essence like an IRA for health insurance when we are older. It is run poorly, but still, we are paying for it with payroll taxes.
The embarrasing part of that chart is how much we pay toward interest on our debt. Imagine if we could wipe that out, health insurance for everyone would be easy then.
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