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Healthcare Payments

In 1960, government paid for 25% of all healthcare expenditures in the U.S. Is this figure now higher, lower, or about the same?

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From 1960 to 2024, the portion of U.S. healthcare expenses paid by government increased from 25% to 51%, while the portion paid by private insurance increased from 21% to 31%, and the portion paid directly by consumers decreased from 47% to 11%. This has created a situation where patients have little incentive to choose healthcare providers with competitive prices or avoid unneeded medical services.

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Child Hunger

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I–VT) claims that the U.S. needs to “make school meals free and universal” because “it is simply outrageous that 1 in 5 children will go hungry this year.”

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IN FACT, Sanders is exponentially exaggerating the child hunger rate, no credible evidence shows that universal free school meals would reduce it, and Sanders has aggressively pushed for policies that would worsen it. Here are the specifics:

A large annual scientific survey commissioned by the USDA shows that 1.1% of households with children had at least one child who was hungry at some point during 2024.
Sanders’ figure of “1 in 5” is actually the rate of “food-insecure” households with children.
As the USDA explains, “low food security” means “reports of reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet” but “little or no indication of reduced food intake.” Prior to 2006, the USDA’s label for such households reflected this fact and called them “food insecure without hunger.”
The USDA report also explains that food insecurity in a household does not necessarily mean food insecurity for the children in that household and emphasizes that “young children are often protected from effects of the households’ food insecurity.”
The report further notes that its food insecurity statistics include everyone “experiencing the condition” at “any time during the previous 12 months,” but the “prevalence of these conditions on any given day is far below the corresponding annual prevalence.”
The survey didn’t include “homeless families and individuals” (which “biases the statistics downward”), but it did include illegal immigrants (who experience hunger at much higher rates than the general population) and people with a “serious mental illness” (who experience hunger at much higher rates than the general population and comprise 5.6% of all non-institutionalized, non-homeless adults in the nation).
In 2019, an average of 20 million children received free daily school lunches, which equates to 36% of all 56 million schoolchildren and 171 times the average daily child hunger rate of 0.21%.
Households that receive Food Stamps are twice as likely to suffer from hunger than households with equivalent incomes who don’t take Food Stamps. The reasons for this are unclear, but moral hazard created by government dependency may be a root cause.
Sanders has supported government money printing, which is the primary driver of inflation.
Sanders has supported pervasive and aggressive government regulations, which raise the costs of living.
Sanders has supported mass illegal immigration, which reduces the wages of low-income workers.
Sanders has supported green energy mandates, which inflate the costs of energy and virtually everything else.
Sanders has supported liberal ethics about sex, which create household fragmentation that dilutes workers’ incomes and is strongly associated with poverty.
Sanders has supported mass unionization, which raises consumer prices.
Sanders has supported the defining economic policies of the Soviet Union, where the average living standard was “roughly one third that of the United States.”

Beyond Sanders, other purveyors of grossly inflated hunger statistics include the New York Times, Think Progress, CBS News, and PolitiFact.

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