Why we spend so much on healthcare

Why we spend so much on health care.

The main reason for our abnormally high health care costs is that our politicians let the hospitals, drug makers, device makers and diagnostic labs set the price and gouge the system.

Health Care doesn’t work like a free market because it is either more like a monopoly or hostage situation. Even when it could work like a market, the control of knowledge makes smart consumerism basically impossible. So, all sensible countries do the same thing when dealing with essential and unavoidable monopolies, they regulate prices, as we do with utilities.

In single-payer countries, this is obviously done as an inherent part of having only the one government insurer. In other countries like Japan, Germany, or Switzerland, they use all-payer. This is where the federal or local government works with the providers and insurers to establish a fair, uniform pricing system. Not only do negotiations result in lower prices, but it doesn’t have the massive amount of administrative waste you see in our system. When you have thousands of insurers independently negotiating with thousands of providers, the system needs to spend huge amounts on paperwork, billing, coding, and processing claims, to name just a few.

So, with data around the world looking as it does, why were politicians talking about bending the cost curve, IT, accountable care organizations, more individual health care cost consciousness, and smarter insurance markets, but not all-payer or single-payer? The answer is good old fashion corruption.

The drug makers don’t want reforms that would allow regular Americans and the government to pay 1/3 less for their products. So, big health care industry players take just a small amount of the billions in profits they make overcharging us and use it to spend hundreds of millions on lobbying Congress, ensuring our politicians will ignore the solution and choose to allow the corrupt system to flourish and continue.

Our Debt Iceberg

There are now 10 states in the US that are insolvent and expected to file for bankruptcy in the near future.

Those states are California, Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island and Wisconsin. These states account for one third of the US population and is significant. Think of it is more then 33% of the US going bankrupt.

Why They Are So Bad Off Financially – High Foreclosure rates, high unemployment, budget deficits, political and legal blocks to having a balanced budget, poor money management.

Real Estate – Declining real estate values cause homeowners to have their house prices adjusted for purposes of paying lower property taxes causing a drop in property tax income revenue. High foreclosure rates means unoccupied homes. That means no taxes on phones, water, cable, Internet etc. More lost revenue. There are very few new housing starts, which means lost jobs and no payroll taxes, and no sales taxes on building supplies and materials. There is also a loss of revenue from building permits and other revenue. A lot of retail space and office space is going vacant which again means lost revenue.

High Unemployment – This means a drop in state income taxes and a drop in city and county taxes as well. This also causes high unemployment benefits with extensions, which hurts the state especially with a shortage of employers paying into the fund due to a large amount of lost revenue.

Result of States Filing Bankruptcy – There will be reductions and loses of pensions for retired workers. There will be layoffs among state workers. There will be defaults in part or in full on financial obligations the state cannot fulfill. The bankruptcies will roll downhill and cities and counties will start to go bankrupt. Prisons will be turning to early release and letting large numbers of inmates out early. Prisons will close and department of corrections staffs will be curtailed. Newly convicted criminals will be steered into supervised release, house arrest, and other programs. There will still be a lot of convicts, just not a lot of people doing prison time. First responders such as police, highway patrols, and department of corrections law enforcement personnel, fire personnel, ambulances, sewer, water, and other personnel will be laid off out of necessity.

Thirty-four states have cut higher education aid and twenty-five states have reduced elementary school aid. Twenty-Seven states have reduced health care benefits for low-income people. Twenty-six states have hiring freezes. Twenty-two states have lowered employee’s wages. Thirteen states have announced layoffs. The worst is yet to come this is the tip of a massive iceberg.

End the FED on our terms

Before the Federal Reserve was founded, the nation was plagued with financial crises. At times, these crises led to “panics” in which people raced to their banks to withdraw their deposits. The failure of one bank often had a domino effect, in which customers of other banks rushed to withdraw funds from their own banks even if those banks were not in danger of failing. Banks needed a source of emergency reserves to prevent the panics and resulting runs from driving them out of business.
A particularly severe panic in 1907 resulted in bank runs that wreaked havoc on the fragile banking system and ultimately led Congress in 1913 to write the Federal Reserve Act. The Federal Reserve System, initially created to address these banking panics, is now charged with several broader responsibilities, including fostering a sound banking system and a healthy economy.

I agree that a central banking system is necessary to maintain a sound banking system and a healthy economy. However the current system has proved to be unsatisfactory in doing so. The Federal Reserve System was devised by the wealthiest families in America on order to help and control the monetary system of America. The problem is that the FED has failed in its quest for monetary soundness. The Federal Reserve System was designed to be complicated and is a deliberate mystery. It was deliberately designed in 1910 to deceive the public, who were opposed the idea of a central bank. The conspirators who met on Jekyll Island in November 1910 knew this. The system was devised by a group of big money families under the idea that it would provide safety to our economy in tough times. The general public today knows little about the FED. Prior to Ron Paul’s Presidential run in 2008, far fewer people understood it.

If there was no Federal Reserve it could be replaced by either the free market or Congress. People who think of themselves as free market people often are not. The tax-funded public schools and the state-regulated and accredited university faculties have taught that the modern system of intrusive civil government is necessary for an orderly society. People cannot imagine a market-based society. The free market is growing world wide and times have changed radically. The Fed is an outdated and harmful system to protect our money and our people. The free market social order is expanding around the world, which is why the world is getting richer. At the Federal level, a free market social order in banking existed prior to 1914. That was back when the dollar was worth over 20 times what it is worth today. One only needs to look at inflation as calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The free market used to control the system and must again.

The free market will determine which will survive and which will not. This isn’t a radical idea at all since there is historical precedents for it. There are two historical cases: the refusal of Congress to renew the charter of the Bank of the United States in 1811, and the refusal of Congress to renew the charter of the Second Bank of the United States in 1836. Both of those central banking systems went bust and we survived. The standard response is that there must be independence between the Federal Reserve System and the U.S. government. This is ridiculous since there exists no such separation with most other agencies. The Department of Defense,The Department of the Treasury,The Department of State and The Department of Education all are established with government. We could list all of the thousands of agencies that are funded by Federal taxes and which operate by means of the authority of the U.S. government.

Whatever replaces the FED will decide the economic fate of Americans. A system controlled by Congress will only lead to hyperinflation. A system controlled by the free market will lead to economic stability. The central bank faces a big problem in order to maintain the boom, the FED must inflate. To cease inflating would allow the credit bubble to implode on a scale far more devastating than what happened in 2008. The monetary policy they follow must produce hyperinflation at some point. That will destroy the FED”s ability to guide the economy. Hyperinflation will lead to alternative currencies.

The Culture War

The Culture War is a clash of ideas about what one believes to be true, and others with different view points. Your experiences, family, friends, education, and the media help to form your belief system, or World View.

The biggest divide in America since the Civil War is raging today. This war has been kept alive for twenty plus years by polarizing demographic powers. The war rages while tearing families in two and keeping America paralyzed.

Right vs. Left, conservative vs. liberal ablaze across the nation. We see a rabid culture war in the abortion debate; attacks on unions in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, and many other states; a culture of drug use and the tug of war in gay rights. There is also an increasingly growing secular vs. religious debate.

In 1990 commentator Pat Buchanan mounted a campaign for the Republican nomination for President of the United States against incumbent George H. W. Bush in 1992. He received a prime time speech slot at the 1992 Republican National Convention, which is sometimes dubbed the “‘culture war’ speech.” During his speech, he claimed: “There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.” In addition to criticizing “environmental extremists” and “radical feminism,” he said public morality was a defining issue.

The answer to peace in this war is moderation. The conservatives should embrace family planning as a way to reduce abortion and government assistance while liberals should embrace personal responsibility, which means that unprotected sex is criticized vehemently. Perhaps also that same sex marriage give way to civil unions as a way to bring both sides closer. By reaching compromise and respecting each other’s opinions and their values we can end this bitter war. If not I’m afraid we will sink into an abyss that our society may not recover from.

Perpetual War

Perpetual War and the Military Industrial Complex

Perpetual war refers to a lasting state of war with no clear ending conditions. It also describes a situation of ongoing tension that seems likely to escalate at any moment, similar to the Cold War or it’s successor The War on Terror. It has over the past sixty plus years formed the basis of America’s crony capitalism and corporate welfare.

The Cold War, began with the Truman Doctrine in 1947 and ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Cold War refers to a polarized state of hostility between economically capitalist allied nations and economically communist nations. The phrase also generically denotes a polarized condition where nations are not actively fighting one another, but are fighting each other through client states, economic policies, and are prepared to engage one another with maximum force at any moment. The cold war emphasized a theory of Balance of power in international relations and, due to the possession of thousands of nuclear weapons by each belligerent, used the doctrine Mutual assured destruction. During proxy wars, the major powers provided aid and support to their respective client state. Soviet rhetoric called these “wars of national liberation” and allied rhetoric called these “Anti-communism” or “Freedom Fighter” wars. When the major powers became directly involved, as the U.S. did in the war in Vietnam, or the Soviet Union did in the Afghanistan, the results were a disaster for the major power due to diminished economic opportunity cost, combat readiness, military morale, and public morale. In these wars both sides found themselves in a long protracted Guerrilla War, in which the native fighters were in their own home environment, and knew the area, and could easily defend the area against any incursion alongside bands of local community supporters. Guerrilla Wars are notoriously hard to win, and leads to the defeat of the attacker, who are eventually forced to withdraw (examples are the Vietnam War, Afghanistan, and the American War of Independence.

Some analysts, such as Noam Chomsky, states that a state of perpetual war is an aid to and is promoted by the powerful members of dominant political and economic classes, helping maintain their positions of economic and political superiority. Living under a state of perpetual war becomes progressively easier in a modern democratic republic, such as the United States, due to the development of a cozy relationship network between people who wield political and economic power also owning capital in companies that financially profit from war, lobby for war, and influence public opinion of war through influence of the media. A relationship between congress, the wealthy and the defense department promulgate the perpetual war state. The relationship of networking between people wielding such power is known as the military–industrial complex and was briefly described by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on January 17, 1961.

The idea that military action can be seen as a form of market-creation goes back at least as far as speeches beginning in 1930 prior to the publication of War Is a Racket in 1935. The economic make-up of the 5th century BC Athens-led Delian League also bears resemblance to the economic ramifications of preparing for Perpetual war. Aspects of any given empire, such as the British Empire and its relation to its domestic businesses that were owned by a wealthy minority of individuals, such as the East India Company, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and De Beers, manifest an observed relationship between a minority of individuals influencing Empire or State policy, such as the Child’s War in India, the Anglo-French conflicts on Hudson Bay in Canada, and the Second Boer War in South Africa. These conflicts follow a pattern where the Empire allocates resources following and sustaining policies that financially profit the Empire’s domestic business’s owners. With the dawning of perpetual war, communities have begun to construct War Memorials with names of the dead while the wars are ongoing. The best memorial to War veterans might in fact be a Peace memorial although there would be no profit in it.

Historian, Alexis de Tocqueville, made predictions in 1840 concerning Perpetual war in democratic countries. In his book Democracy in America is asserts:
“No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country. Not indeed that after every victory it is to be apprehended that the victorious generals will possess themselves by force of the supreme power, after the manner of Sulla and Caesar; the danger is of another kind. War does not always give over democratic communities to military government, but it must invariably and immeasurably increase the powers of civil government; it must almost compulsorily concentrate the direction of all men and the management of all things in the hands of the administration. If it does not lead to despotism by sudden violence, it prepares men for it more gently by their habits. All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and the shortest means to accomplish it. This is the first axiom of the science.”

The only way we can overcome peace and its negative economic impact on America’s Military Industrial Complex as well as its negative political impact on the wealthy who profit from this kind of tyranny, is to make certain that our world is in perpetual chaos and through the perpetration of Perpetual War.