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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (528219)	11/12/2009 11:55:13 AM
From: RetiredNow	3 Recommendations Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1575900

You are the ignorant one. Costs going up due to inflation is a wholly different story than what's happening in Health Care. Health Care costs have routinely increased FASTER than inflation, while the benefits we receive have been cut over time. In the tech industry, you may see increases in costs due to inflation, but improvements in tech and economies of scale on new products typically drive the costs right back down, which has been the continual value proposition in tech. And btw, I know something of it, because I've worked my entire career in tech related industries. If Health Care was truly a competitive industry, companies would have market incentives to provide faster, cheaper, better medical care at lower prices. But today they don't. In many parts of the country, some companies have monopoly power. The Health Care industry is NOT a free market. That is precisely why government intervention is necessary. Should the government compete by creating a public option? I don't agree with that, but I do want the government to rewrite the rules a bit to ensure that companies start competing for our business instead of us begging to get covered. And here's something else, the costs of health care to our government is one of the primary drivers of our structural or fixed budget deficits. If we want to solve the budget deficit problem, then we need to solve the Health Care problem. Bush Jr's Medicare Prescription Drug plan added huge structural/fixed, recurring costs that are part of our huge deficits. That is why it is important to solve.