An interesting excerpt

I found this interesting excerpt from David Frum's review of Thomans Edsall's 2012 book The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics. You can read the whole review here:

Edsall excoriates the cost of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Yet the mesmerizing fact in US fiscal policy is not the cost of defense, but the wastefulness of US health spending. The US spends 17 points of GDP on healthcare. Runner-up Switzerland spends 13. Four points! That’s the whole defense budget right there! Given that US health spending breaks down 50-50 between public sector and private sector, the elimination of healthcare waste could add 2 points worth of GDP to the spending power of both the public and private sectors.
To put that in perspective: the public sector’s 2 points of GDP would have sufficed nearly to eliminate the federal budget deficit in the Bush years.

For the private sector, 2 additional points of GDP would have qualified as a 4% pay increase for the average worker.

These are serious sums of money that ramify through every economic calculation.