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

To: Lane3 who wrote (8289)	8/14/2009 5:24:45 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 42652

Not suggesting that they do so. I didn't think you where. I was just fleshing out the idea.

To: Lane3 who wrote (8289)	8/14/2009 6:14:13 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Why We Think We Can’t Afford Health Care Posted by Shannon Love on August 13th, 2009 In 1900, most people walked to work, school, shopping and socializing. The percentage of the average household’s budget devoted to transportation was so low that the Census bureau didn’t even bother to collect data on it. Today, the average household spends 21% of its budget on transportation. It’s the second biggest single cost after housing yet people take such spending for granted and easily factor it in to their personal budgets. We do so because transportation costs rose slowly over the course of the last half century while other costs, such as food, decreased. Decade after decade we gradually became used to spending more and more for transportation till now the average middle-class family easily accepts spending several thousand dollars a year in transportation costs. As a thought experiment, imagine that for some reason people never had to individually pay the cost of their own transportation. Imagine that as technology changed and people began to travel further and further on a daily basis, institutions such as businesses and the government began to pay for transportation costs. Imagine that private employers provided people with cars as an employment benefit and that the government provided cars or an alternative for the poor and elderly. Imagine that most people never had to sit down and write a check for the cost of cars, fuel, insurance, train tickets or anything else associated with transportation. Imagine that most people didn’t even have a vague idea how much their transportation actually cost. Imagine that most people never experienced the gradual rise in transportation costs from too-insignificant-to-measure into the second-biggest chunk of their budgets. In such a case, people wouldn’t have developed their total budgets with a huge chunk devoted to transportation. Instead, they would spend that money on housing, food, entertainment, consumer goods, etc. Moreover, such spending would become structural not only for individuals but for society. Everyone would have intuitive expectations that a certain income would buy a certain level of housing and other consumption without taking into account the cost of transportation. Now imagine that an individual lost their transportation benefits. Suddenly, they have to figure how to pay for thousands of dollars a year in transportation costs. Most people don’t have that kind of slack in their budgets. They couldn’t pay that much without significantly reducing their standard of living in every other part of their lives. Most people would interpret this condition as being unable to afford transportation. No doubt, in this scenario, politicians would swarm out of the woodwork claiming that only the government could possible pay for transportation for everyone except the wealthy. They would claim that it was completely impossible for a middle-class family to pay a shocking 20% of their income for transportation. This is pretty much an analogy for why we believe that no one but the rich can afford to pay for their own health care. In 1900, health care consumed only a couple of percentage points of the average family’s budget because medical science couldn’t actually do much. Gradually, over the course of the last century as medical science improved, the cost of paying for treatments that actually worked rose gradually as well. However, unlike with transportation, most people never had to individually budget for health care. Starting in the ’30s and ’40s, right at the time that medicine really became effective, government and business began taking money out of people’s paychecks for medical care and spending it for them. Most people who worked did earn enough money to pay for their health care. Further, through payroll taxes, they paid for the health care of the poor and elderly as well. We always earned the money to pay for our health care but we never held it in our hands or had to write the check. We never had to sit down and balance our health care spending against our other spending needs. Our own health care spending just happened automatically without most of us having to think about it. Indeed, most people don’t even think of the part of their wages that covers their benefits and payroll taxes as even being their money in the first place. When people talk about benefits, they say that their employer pays in the same way they say that the employer pays for the building they work in. Only people who’ve had to make a payroll understand that each individual employee earns and pays in full for each individual benefit... chicagoboyz.net