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Originally Posted by willravel
Because it's common sense. If health care won't pay for elective surgeries, then they won't be included in health care costs. It's a big bucket of duh.
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You provide data. You don't know what the basis of the data is, yet you draw conclusions from the data. I suggest that you be careful with those conclusions and now you take the position that I am totally out in left field. Generally health care expenditures will fall under a very broad definition to even include things like licensing boards, regulatory oversight, health care promotions/advertising, schools for the blind/disabled, drug rehab, vocational rehab, certain types retirement homes, etc, etc, etc. When data is collected from a hospital or surgical center, they report raw numbers, administrators don't care if the payments they recieve are from a person in a room receiving cosmetic surgery compared to a person with cancer. In some cases the aggregate reports won't break that data down and the higher up the data goes the less precise it is. When a prescription is given for pain, how does an economist know if it was for cosmetic surgery or a broken arm?
Again, all I say is be careful of the conclusions you draw from the data you post. Perhaps, it would be a good idea to read the foot notes as well.
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Here is some data that describes state level government expenditures on health care. T he link is helpful because it gives more detail in what is included in their numbers and the approach taken.
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Spending by state governments is about one-fifth of total spending for health care in the United States. States spent $224 billion in fiscal year 1998 and $238 billion in 1999. In each of these years, state funds were 53 percent of the total; the remainder was federal matching funds and grants.
National health care expenditures are now 13 percent of the gross domestic product. Total spending for health care reached $1.1 trillion in 1998 and is projected to total $2.2 trillion by 2008, growing at an average annual rate of 7.2 percent.
Public spending for health care, by all levels of government, exceeds private-sector spending, according to a recent analysis by the Employee Benefits Research Institute (EBRI). According to this analysis, public spending in 1998 was 58 percent of the total; considerably more than the 45.5 percent calculated by the federal Health Care Financing Administration.*
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For this report, states were asked to report direct personal health expenditures, including expenditures to cover treatment of physical health conditions as well as mental health and substance abuse services. These figures generally exclude expenditures for subsistence and personal care. Spending detailed in this report for public health-related expenditures, corrections, higher education, community-based services, and state facility–based services therefore does not represent the totality of spending in these areas but rather only the direct personal health expenditures in these categories.
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In addition, states provided totals for expenditures in other public health–related areas. Depending on the state, the amounts reported for other public health care expenditures may include money spent on the following kinds of services:
* pharmaceutical assistance for the elderly
* childhood immunization
* chronic disease hospitals and programs
* hearing aid assistance
* adult day care for persons with Alzheimer's disease
* health grants
* medically handicapped children
* Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) programs
* pregnancy outreach and counseling
* chronic renal disease treatment programs
* AIDS testing
* breast and cervical cancer screening
* tuberculosis (TB) programs
* emergency health services
* adult genetics programs
* Phenylketonuria (PKU) testing
* health promotion and education program
* schools for the blind
* schools for the deaf
* mental health hospitals
* facilities for the developmentally disabled
* substance abuse facilities
* veterans' homes
* rehabilitation facilities
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http://www.milbank.org/1998shcer/index.html#total
Certainly State governments are generally not providing elective health care treatments like plastic surgery. But people in the private sector certainly spend billions on this form of health care, and they are included in the numbers you reported, as well as some other things you might not expect..