To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (528315 ) 11/13/2009 8:21:15 AM From: RetiredNow 5 Recommendations Read Replies (3) | Respond to of 1575193 Ten, actually, health care has quite a bit to do with the economy. If you dissect the budget deficits, you will see that there are discretionary contributing items and non-discretionary contributing items. The non-discretionary items are things like mandatory Medicare/Medicaid payments, and the Prescription Drug plan and 2 tax cuts Bush passed. Those are non-discretionary, because they were codified by Congressional Laws that Bush Jr. signed off on that resulted in huge losses of future tax revenue streams and huge increases in health care costs to our government. And here's the kicker. The discretionary items are the minority of our deficit. Obama could stop spending all discretionary items and we'd still have a huge deficit. So what to do? Well the first thing to do is take a look at the largest contributor to the deficits and see what you can do about it. Guess which one that is? Health care. Not only that, but the leading cause of bankruptcies in this country are caused by health issues, which results in a loss of massive amounts of tax revenues. That is what the GOP won't tell you and that is why the Dems are in such a bother to fix it, above and beyond their altruistic universal coverage goals. But the GOP isn't interested in solving this problem, because they know it is adding massive deficits and that makes the Dems look bad. It's one part of their strategy for getting back to power. Also, with the Dems aiming for universal coverage, the GOP figures they can twist that into cries of Socialism. It's actually a pretty sick game the GOP is playing. It's power grabbing at the expense of the American people. If they were really serious about solving the problem, they could probably help the Dems make it a much better bill by inserting a healthy dose of provisions that ensure a competitive free market. The GOP is good at that. Makes you wonder why they just say "no" and don't do anything to help.