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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: geode00 who wrote (126598)	2/7/2008 5:44:27 PM
From: ThirdEye	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 362986

Let's see if I can take a stab at health care demographics. Insurance carriers make their money by selling policies to younger people, the ones who don't need to use the system. Like with social security, they are the ones supporting the services being used by older people. So if premiums were to stay the same, and if there a rising proportion of older people (as we have now), then we would also need either more younger people as well, or we would need a healthier population, or higher paying jobs, or more employers paying into the system--or all of the above. But we don't have any of those things: we don't have a rising birth rate that supplies more younger people to pay into the system, we don't have more employers paying into the system (because so many jobs have been shipped overseas; because premiums have risen, making the cost of insuring everyone prohibitive), we don't have higher paying jobs being created (in fact, just the opposite)and we don't have a population that's getting healthier. So premiums have to go up. As that happens, of course, even fewer employers can afford coverage, or else the coverage they can afford shrinks, and the carriers have to be ever more careful about covering people they think are going to be eating up services. It's a vicious cycle, fueled by the economic policies of the piss-on-you neocons. So, what is happening to health care is exactly what would be happening to social security if it was privatized. Fewer people covered, costs going up, no government bail-out, profit-driven draconian measures to squeeze every last shrinking dollar out of you.