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Spot The Unsustainable Entitlement
In the words of Sesame Street, one of these spending components of the long-run budget plan is not like the others; one of these entitlements is not the same; can you spot which one? As BofAML notes, "no long-run budget plan would likely be effective if this rapidly growing program is not significantly constrained. This cost reflects growth in the economy, an aging population and an 'excess' growth factor that includes both medical advances and presumably inefficiencies."
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Can you also do this for the NHS?
Natural monopolies such as local medical coverage, do not deliver efficient market prices to consumers.
Why doesn't the US privatise your fire departments? It would be good to see if the cost to consumers rises ahead of inflation? LOL!
911
Distressed victim - Help my house is burning down, send a fire engine!!
Operator - OK Mam, can you give me your address?
Distressed victim - Sure it's 1402 Main St.
Operator - OK Mam, I see here you home is valued at $350,000? So todays calls out will be $109,000 Mam. Do you wish to proceed?
Distressed victim - What?!?! $109,000 are you kidding me??? Sigh, No, No, not yet. Let me get 2 more quotes first.
Operator - OK Mam, have a nice day.
NONE of them are sustainable because they are eventually all paid by the same entity. The Feds.
Aren't perpetual wars also "unsustainable entitlements"?
Why do you Hate the Troops? (and the MIC)
I don't hate "the troops"...I hate anyone inherently violent enough and intellectually docile enough to kill on command with no questions asked.
I was just kiddin'. And I tipped you for your comment.
I would like to bet on a pill for the endless dream at retirement-age (eg. Drion) and some sort of Soylent. That will be more sustainable.
It is a socialist trick. It is to hide welfare costs by lumping contract entitlements for people who have paid into Medicare with giveaway programs such as Medicaid. (And as DCFusor relates here, insurance allows the health care industry to exhort tremendous profits by charging above normal market rates.)
One major reason for rising medical costs, of course, is the expanded use of the Medicaid program for illegal immigrants. Obamacare extends the Medicaid crisis and relies on Medicaid to cover upwards of 20 million more people beginning in 2014.
“Between 1990 and 2010, national Medicaid spending increased from $72 billion to over $400 billion,” according to a May 6, 2011 report by the Heritage Foundation. “Federal spending alone has increased from $40 billion in 1990 to an estimated $271 billion in 2010. At the state level, Medicaid spending has increased four times faster than elementary and secondary spending, five times faster than higher education spending, and nine times faster than transportation spending over the past two decades.”
Here is an excerpt from an historical review of “medicare” from DISCOVERTHENETWORKS.ORG:
On July 31, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed legislation creating the Medicare and Medicaid programs to provide comprehensive health care coverage for people aged 65 and older, as well as for the poor, blind, and disabled. By 1968, these new government programs had caused healthcare-related spending nationwide to skyrocket and to become a major political concern. America's $50 billion in medical expenditures for that year was 25 percent higher than the corresponding figure for 1965; 500 percent higher than the figure for 1948; and 1,250 percent higher than the 1929 total…
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=615
Healthcare costs growth are out of control. All other industrialized nations put some price controls on health procedures, drugs, etc. For-Profit Healthcare is immoral. In capitalism, businesses charge as much as the market will bear for goods/services.
How much will you pay to regain your health? Answer: Anything. Everything.
And the HC industry knows that.
In capitalism, businesses charge as much as the market will bear for goods/services.
You got that right, friend.
It’s socialism that destroys what “the market will bear.” When the state shoves your face to the ground with its socialist cum fascism boot, the maker of that boot your attacker is wearing is a socialist tyrant, whether he carries the fascist flag of the 82nd Airborne or the Red Flag of Socialism.
Crony capitalism is fascism, a.k.a. socialism. As John T. Flynn states, “Fascism is Fabian socialism plus the inevitable dictator.”
Healthcare costs were doing just fine, thank you, until President Lyndon Johnson on July 31, 1965, signed legislation creating the Medicare and Medicaid; fifty years later America still is reaping the “benefit” of his Great Society liberalism and socialism – bankruptcy.
"How much will you pay to regain your health? Answer: Anything. Everything."
Maybe that is true. But, this really isn't the question that ought to be asked. End of life care costs about one third of the amount of all the care spent over our entire life. This late spending doesn't regain anyone's health. It adds a few months or maybe a year to our lifespans. And at what quality? Often pretty miserable.
So if you ask me if I'd give everything I had at 40 years old for a treatment that gave me 100% health, then of course I would. But at 80 years old, do I want that transaction in order to gain a few extra months, likely in a nursing home? I'll pass.
I know it is easy to say now, but those are the plans I have made, put on paper and told everyone about.
I tipped you for that comment and agree 100%. I've seen oldsters living that last year of painful life. My father was on 2X a week dialysis for kidney failure. He hated it and finally told my brother who was care-giver, "that's it. I'm not going anymore ." He said his goodbyes and passed away within a couple weeks.
IOW, watch out for the last two months of life.
Regardless of age, hospital admission rates do not increase until just a few months before death, according to James F. Fries, M.D. Using a study by the Manitoba Health Services, research shows that “two months before death a quarter of people are hospitalized; in their last month, about half of the people are hospitalized.
Another study Fries cites, Medicare Reimbursement per Enroller, shows that medical costs don’t necessarily rise with age. “Medicare costs for those who survive a given year do not increase with age. It is the high cost of death and the increase in the fraction of each successive age group who die that cause the apparent increase in costs per year. These high cost deaths are often painful, undignified, agonizing, and include a lot of intensive technical life support.
“Conclusion? If we can decrease the high cost of death we can greatly decrease high medical costs in older age groups.”
Your father's sentiments are my sentiments - I hope they hold...
Tipped. Agree 100%.
Canada's system looks pretty good from here... vs a bankrupt ponzi... Why not repeal Obummercare, and expand Medicare to 55 and older, but put REAL means testing in, and force the drug companies to knock off the bullshit. Another ESSENTIAL component is to STOP all benefits to ILLEGALS and make expensive optional procedures self pay. Ditto end of life treatments, like surgery to extend terminal patients lives for 3 months...
“Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.”
Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Great quote! That's a keeper.
And this a REAL graph of "things to happen" between 2012 and 2082? How about forecasting the price of APPL between 2012 and 2082?
Why do these charts never contain the very REAL entitlement of government benefits and pensions?
They are as large as SS!
This is just one way we are done for. Just one more.
No worries. The S&P will follow the same Laszlo Birinyi Ruler trajectory and we'll all be saved.
2082... Nice graph though. Many would wish to be paid to produce graphs like that.
Here's the problem with HC in this country IMO: we treat doctors like demi-gods. I know doctors are smart.... and they spend a lot of time and money getting an MD. And that time and money is always the justification for them earning such high salaries. But I know guys who have been MDs for 35-45 years! That's a long time to milk that medical school time/$ excuse at a quite exhorbitant rate. No?
Yeah, as usual the obvious always escapes us.We could chop medical spending in half via disclosure laws, make everyone post a rate sheet. The most important staff member of a medical practice is the "billing specialist", they know how to milk any malady.
No one ever asks the doc "how much?" and truth be told most would be flummoxed by the question.
I'll take that graph more seriously when I see a line for "military spending" - one that includes the black budget.
Actually since Medicare is not mathematical theory, aka numbers game, it is actual services rendered, then the follies of monetarism, in this case Keynesian, shows what the effects are on Medicare.
In other words, one must ask, WHY is something which cannot hide the cost of inflation, be going up?
Can someone say Inflation? Can someone say Inflation + Baby Boomers?
You see when you don't have a physical economy, you have a paper economy that not only pays no attention to the physical economy but has been dismantling the physical economy for 40 years, then what happens is...... everything real that is needed costs more.
The answer isn't getting rid of medicare. Then you are only treating a symptom (and fucking over a lot of people needlessly).
The answer is to get to the root cause of the inflation in real shit.
Monetarism
The ditching of the physical economy and the scientific progress that increases economies of scale.
'Getting Medicare in line' is treating Ebola with Tylenol.
Glass-Steagall
American Credit System
Great projects like NAWAPA, Fusion, NASA. You know REAL wealth creators. Not the fake paper kind. More water, power, technology, higher orders of infrastructure (aka not just replacing outmoded roads and bridges).
It's not that hard, but it also takes realizing that Medicare isn't the problem. The problem is just resulting in manifestation of Medicare's numbers versus the Gov'ts Revenues. When people don't work. When people work less. When inflation is high on real shit. When the physical economy and all it's technological breakthroughs, cost reductions, substitutions, etc are ditched, the graphs look like this.
It's a fucking no brainer. THIS is what SYMPTOMS of much larger structural problems look like.
Ditch Monetarism.
Insist on Glass-Steagall or under the threat of having to bailout your deposits, they'll throw trillions at more frauds and it'll all still fail, and your deposits will go poof. Only having a structure where Glass-Steagall isn't in place, purposefully (for the banks) uses your deposits as levereage for their bailouts. Rinse and repeat until hyperinflation.
Guess when that happens, medicare's charts based on actual costs of real shit won't be through the roof? That's the point. It's not the medicare. It's the overall structure of the economy that is killing medicare, and fools who believe in symptoms as being problems and push the wrong remedies (remedies crossed out but ain't showing up) catalysts.
Trick question. Every entitlement is unsustainable. The question is only a matter of when. I'm a long enough time line the survival rate drops to zero.
Remembering of course that as demonstrated by somebodiy's post around here just last week, CBO projections are exactly as reliable as an Obama promise.
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