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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (2404)	10/27/2007 3:18:17 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

To insure against catastrophic health care costs, shouldn't and almost always doesn't cost $4 or $5 thousand. Most of the time you only go to the doctor when something bad happens. The cost for a annual checkup, or occasional vaccinations, should not be extraordinarily difficult to meet for most families, and to the extent it is for families earning $50k+ they probably should do a better job budgeting, and reducing other expenses. Alan Greenspan, not exactly an ultra Liberal, has said that entitlement programs are not a problem. I'd be surprised that he did say such a thing, I have my doubts. But even if he did, arguments from authority are pretty weak. For every well known and/or well credentialed person that can be found to say X, one can be found that says not X. I would listen to Greenspan's arguments, but absent the arguments, a non detailed third party claim of what he said, without any direct quotes, is close to meaningless. on a cash accounting basis we have a shortfall, but on an accrual basis, this is not a problem. Its more the other way around. On a current cash accounting basis the funds (to the extent that considering them real funds makes sense) have plenty of money, and certainly they are taking in more than they are spending at the moment. The government as a whole has a deficit, but one that's smaller than the average for the past several decades in terms of % of GDP. But future obligations (which are covered by accrual accounting) are the problem. First Social Security and Medicare will start spending more than their dedicated taxes take in (which means regular income taxes will pay for the programs), and they will draw down on the supposed trust funds (which don't actually exist as funds, the money has already been spent, they are promises of the government to pay money to itself). Then eventually the nominal "trust funds" will "be exhausted". But setups of trust funds, and government levels of obligation to itself are not the real issue. The real issue is the amount of money these programs will consume. In the short run we are ok. In the middle run we have the problem of the baby boomers retiring. In the middle and long run we have the problem that people are living longer, and retirement ages in these programs are not going up nearly as fast.