Those who thought that the Washington Post (a.k.a. Fox on 15th Street) couldn't get any worse, have just been proven wrong yet again. The Post ran a little primer telling readers about Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

The Post tells readers:

"a GAO report found that total government health-care spending in the United States is somewhere in the middle. In the United States, spending on public health was 6.9 percent of gross domestic product in 2005, while it was 8.9 percent in France, 8.2 percent in Germany and 7.2 percent in the United Kingdom. On the lower end of the spectrum, Australia spent 6.4 percent of GDP on health care and Canada spent 6.9 percent. Some of the countries that spend more have had a demographic shift to an older population sooner than the United States."

Okay, boys and girls, can anyone see the problem with this discussion?

That's right! All the other countries included in this discussion have public health care systems. The figures cited for public health care spending comprise the bulk of their national spending on health care. Only in the United States do we have a large private health care sector that spends roughly the same amount as the public sector.

This means that rather being in the middle of the pack, as this discussion implies, we are way over the top. To pay for most of the health care needs of our seniors and our poor, our government pays almost as much Germany, Canada, and the U.K. do to provide for the health care needs of their population.

Of course this point should have been central to this whole primer. The reason that Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are projected to "usurp much of the revenue from federal taxes," is that health care costs in the United States are out of control. If the U.S. paid the same amount per person for health care as any of these other countries it would be looking at huge budget surpluses in the long-term, not deficits.

There is one other especially striking item in this piece. It told readers:

"The last major change to Social Security happened in 1984, when President Ronald Reagan raised the Social Security tax rate (the percentage of income under the maximum taxable earnings limit that is subject to tax) and the full retirement age from 65 to 67."

Umm, the year was 1983, not 1984. This primer is not ready for prime time.

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