…you wake up from sleep with a blog topic. Sheesh. I think that I may need therapy. But that’ll have to wait.
I wonder if we ever really looked at what we are paying for health care and if we did would it change our perspective on things?
So I went to the Province of NB web site. Found we are spending $1.81 billion on health care this year. Then I went to Stats Canada and found out there are about 285,000 households in New Brunswick. So the average tax spend on health care per household is now $6,360 (+/-). Then add in the $1,610 we spend per household privately on health care and the average household in New Brunswick spends just under $8,000/year on health care. Now to put that in perspective, NB households, on average, spend $6,060/year on food. We spend more on healthcare than all other expenditures except shelter and taxes.
Now, for those of you thinking that these numbers just don’t add up – remember that 40% of that public health care number is paid for by Albertans and Ontarioians so we don’t actually spend this money. They do. But if we actually raised enough tax dollars here that is the amout we would have to pay if we weren’t bailed out by Ontario and Alberta.
But it still makes you stop and think.