ACP45 wrote:
Excerpts from an article entitled "Americans Had To Borrow 88 Billion Dollars To Cover Their Medical Bills Last Year" - Link at bottom
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Fixing our horribly broken health care system needs to be a top national priority, but earlier today Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made it abundantly clear that nothing will be done about Obamacare in the Senate until the 2020 election. And of course the Democrats are not going to make any major moves on health care until the 2020 election either.
Unfortunately, we are stuck with what we have got for the moment.
Our health care crisis is a national nightmare that never seems to end, and it gets worse with each passing year.
So for now, just hope that nobody in your family becomes seriously ill, because if that happens there is a good chance you might go bankrupt.
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Here are some more numbers that show the current state of the U.S. health care system…
–3.7 trillion dollars was spent on health care in the United States in 2018. That breaks down to $10,739 per person.
-If our health care system was a country, it would have the fifth largest GDP on the entire planet.
–76 percent of Americans believe that they pay too much for the quality of health care that they receive.
-Out of the 36 counties in the OECD, the U.S. ranks 31st in infant mortality.
-Prescription drugs are the fourth leading cause of death in the United States today.
-Pharmaceutical companies spend approximately 30 billion dollars a year to market their drugs to all of us.
–Nearly half of all U.S. doctors are considering leaving the field of medicine, and health insurance companies are the primary reason.
-The median charge for visiting an emergency room in the United States is well over a thousand dollars.
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/americans-had-to-borrow-88-billion-dollars-to-cover-their-medical-bills-last-yearExcerpts from an article entitled "Americans ... (
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LOOK AT THE BOTTOM LINE!!
The Green New Deal will raise your taxes sky high and you can’t afford it, so… Well, you know the rest: the GND is great in theory but it will cost too much. That, in a phrase, is the argument against the GND.
But that is the dishonest argument of a con man. The first thing to know about economics is that if something can be done technically, it can be done financially. The GND is a major investment that must be evaluated like all investments: by looking at the bottom line. And your bottom line is not your tax bill. Your bottom line is your net worth as a result of the GND: how will it affect your bank account? The rest of this essay will examine how the GND is financed and how that affects your bottom line.
Typically, the first question asked is: “Where will the money come from?” That’s the wrong question. We all know where the money for Medicare For All will come from. It will come from the only legitimate source of money: the US Treasury, in the form of Treasury checks to people. That’s also the source of money for aircraft carriers. There is no other legitimate source of Congressional money.
The right question to ask is: “Where is all that money going?” The annual cost of health care for 300 million Americans at an average cost of $10 thousand each is $3 trillion. If we include the annual cost of expense-paid university education for all qualified students and the annual cost of replacing fossil fuels with green energy, we have to add another trillion. That $4 trillion dollars will about double the current amount of annual Congressional spending. Where will all that new $4 trillion go? That is one thing we do know! It will follow the path of last year’s $4 trillion. Let’s have a look and see what actually happened.
When Congress spends $4 trillion, 10% or $400 billion lands in domestic private bank accounts. Yes, deficit spending equals after-tax savings! That’s why World War II spending gave us 30 years of prosperity. War workers cashed in war bonds for cars, homes, and kids. If Congress spends $8 trillion, much more than $800 billion will land in those accounts because of “tax bracket creep”. Not bad!
Our problem will not be money but rather physical resources. Whereas we probably have enough resources for free education but, for Medicare for All, there will be a scarcity of doctors, dentists, etc., until free education provides enough personnel. For that reason, Medicare for All will have to be implemented gradually, starting with children up to age 19 plus students. Their robust health will have a minimal impact. Annually, additional age groups can be phased in from both ends of the age spectrum. We should also expect that foreign personnel would be attracted to US wages. That would hasten the maturation of the new healthcare system. Eventually, with expense-paid education for all, there will be enough doctors, dentists, oculists, nurses, and other medical personnel to satisfy our needs.
Most of the rest of the GND is green energy. That will be a matter of training our millions of unemployed and under-employed for construction work. When material shortages arise and begin to cause harmful inflation, it may be necessary to drop production levels down to two shifts or even to one shift. The most important principle is maximum use of resources, especially time. The Green New Deal is the moral equivalent of war. If we want to save our planet, we must use every minute of our lives.
Above all, we must stop thinking of money as a scarce resource. Where Congress is concerned, money is only a number to be used to indicate the quantity of effort it demands from the private sector. Our only problem is the threat of inflation. And then, it’s only a warning to slow down to a jog instead of a sprint.
© 2019 Marvin Sussman. All rights reserved. Search: YouTube.com for Marvin Sussman!