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

To: Lane3 who wrote (9050)	9/3/2009 5:42:55 PM
From: Lane3	3 Recommendations Respond to of 42652

Why are we spending more on healthcare? The answer from Nobel Prize winning economic historian Robert Fogel: The main factor is that the long-term income elasticity of the demand for healthcare is 1.6—for every 1 percent increase in a family’s income, the family wants to increase its expenditures on healthcare by 1.6 percent. This is not a new trend. Between 1875 and 1995, the share of family income spent on food, clothing, and shelter declined from 87 percent to just 30 percent, despite the fact that we eat more food, own more clothes, and have better and larger homes today than we had in 1875. All of this has been made possible by the growth in the productivity of traditional commodities. In the last quarter of the 19th century, it took 1,700 hours of labor to purchase the annual food supply for a family. Today it requires just 260 hours, and it is likely that by 2040, a family’s food supply will be purchased with about 160 hours of labor. Consequently, there is no need to suppress the demand for healthcare. Expenditures on healthcare are driven by demand, which is spurred by income and by advances in biotechnology that make health interventions increasingly effective. Just as electricity and manufacturing were the industries that stimulated the growth of the rest of the economy at the beginning of the 20th century, healthcare is the growth industry of the 21st century. It is a leading sector, which means that expenditures on healthcare will pull forward a wide array of other industries including manufacturing, education, financial services, communications, and construction. gregmankiw.blogspot.com

To: Lane3 who wrote (9050)	9/3/2009 6:36:32 PM
From: Peter Dierks	2 Recommendations Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42652

The piece describing the new law doesn't speak to any particular outbreak. If it's ebola and there's a vaccine, it seems to me reasonable to require people to accede either to the vaccine or quarantine. The risk to the population is just too great. When you give power to people like Obama they will abuse it. Remember chief of staff Rahm Emanuel's, callous enjoiner, "Never let a serious crisis go to waste"? They even manufacture crisises to use to bully through their socialist anti-American agenda. Give them power like locking people up for being sick and soon we will be on their enemies list and will strangely become sick. It will be a mystery. That won't change the fact that your computer connection won't be on during your quarantine.