At 2:21 PM -0400 28/8/09, Charles Bennett wrote:
>It's not the 1 trillion.
>
>http://www.usdebtclock.org/
>
>It's that the government has spent ALL of our money already.
>
>We already know that the CBO says that his health care reform will not
>only not save any money but will cost more that what we have now.
Given that the US health care costs are the highest of the
OECD nations, for lower success measures on almost all important
metrics, then if you can't manage to find ways to reduce that figure
even after a significant reform process, your nation is obviously
just incompetent.
If reform doesn't actually save you money, just give up and
outsource your entire national health system to some other nation.
Its your only hope.
Seriously, the US health system is a laughing stock and a
national tragedy. Attempting to muddy that basic truth with partisan
carping about Obama is amazingly counterproductive.
Chuck, admit it. You know the US health system is broken. You
know, deep in your heart, that no Republican administration is ever
going to really try fixing it. And you probably also would have to
grudgingly admit that the Obama administration is about as competent
a Democrat administration on the issue as you are likely to get. So
this is your best chance to fix it. And you can help, or indulge in
partisan bitching, like the rest of Republican party.
>We know that Obama blew the deficit estimates by 2 trillion (somehow
>his inability to get it right , after ignoring the CBO number of 10
>trillion, was still bush's fault)
>
>1) medicare is broke. 39 trillion in the red
>2) Social Security is 10 trillion in the red
>3) Our unfunded liabilities are about the same as the WORLDS GDP.
>4) We are spending a little less than 1 billion dollars a DAY to just
>to pay the interest on our debt.
>
>Now we are in the worst recession since the great depression.
>
>Unemployment is near 10%
>
>IRS revenues are down 37% and the over all loss of home values etc.
>exceeds 12 trillion, so the people that had some money have a lot less.
>(those rich folks aren't so rich at the moment..)
>
>So the answer is to spend MORE? WTF?
Yes. The answer is to spend more in the short term to fix the
long term problem.
A national economy isn't like balancing the family budget,
more like a business, in which viability of fundamentals is the issue
more than how much is in the tin this week. The US health system is
broken, and a huge drain on the economy in many ways. To lift the
economy, work on fixing the problem. To keep the economy broken, keep
thinking in terms of which important reforms you can avoid paying
for, and which parts of the economy you can leave broken.
It is like having an old, broken, car. Sure, spending a whole
lot to get a new car seems like a big expense. But if the new one
costs less to run, doesn't cost you money by breaking down and need
to repaired all the time, doesn't continually interrupt your
opportunities to earn money or otherwise carry on with life etc by
breaking down when you need to get places, etc, then it is cheaper in
the long run to invest in something that works.
>We are supposed to just *believe* that THIS time it will be
>different.
Well, it probably won't be worse. What are the chances that
you will manage to come up with the worlds least efficient health
system twice?
>That simply taxing some rich folks and cutting the amount
>we pay doctors is going to magically cause the 50 MILLION people we
>add to the system plus anyone else that wants the public option,
>(with no additional doctors, nurses or hospitals) not to run up the
>cost to all of us much more than predicted and lead to more and more
>government intervention and intrusion into our lives as they try to
>constrain costs and "target" health care to the needy.
Well, for a start, preventative medicine, regular checkups,
and dealing with chronic problems at the start rather than waiting
for them to become crippling, all actually save money in the long
run. The US system makes most of those things impractical for most of
the population.
Consider things like medical debt being the leading cause of
bankruptcy in the US. Surely, reducing that figure will help the
entire economy?
>
>This all started well before Bush, before Obama, closer to FDR or
>Johnson, but that doesn't change anything.
Yeah, the FDR/Truman era is when the US really committed to
the wrong path, though of course it had taken the first few steps
down the wrong road before then.
It has got significantly worse since the 1980s, though.
Cheers
David
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