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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam who wrote (64281)	4/3/2018 12:53:34 PM
From: zzpat	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 364356

Don't forget that the US ranks #43 when it comes to life expectancy and the reason is for this problem is because we have republicans. It's not just that we're declining it's that the rest of the world has moved far ahead of us. The trolling gop can't do anything about healthcare because it doesn't involve going deeper into debt with tax cuts for the rich.

To: Sam who wrote (64281)	4/3/2018 1:30:32 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 364356

If Dubya had actually been interested in saving SS, he wouldn't have passed those huge tax cuts in his first term that undermined the budget and he would have paid for the useless war he conducted against Iraq, which enriched his "base" and destroyed the budget. There would have been plenty of money to deal with both SS and Medicare if a responsible person had been president. It wasn't SS and Medicare that have failed, it is the Republican leadership that has failed. Both of the above statements are ignorantly false. The Bush tax cuts raised tax revenue for the ensuing years, and the cost of the wars doesn't even begin to touch the unfunded liability for SS. Even with the tax cuts deficits remained reasonable until Obama took office, given we were fighting wars on two fronts. This is, quite obviously, nothing any president could do to "deal with both SS and Medicare." Anyone who believes this simply doesn't have a grasp of the nature or scope of the problem. I recommend you read the Trustee's report. Whatever could be the reason for those out of control costs? This is no mystery. Medicare came into existence in June of 1965. AS YOU CAN SEE, almost to the minute when health care costs began to increase at a pace far faster than CPI. This is fairly simple if you try. Medicare and Medicaid are price controlled and constitute 1/2 of the market for health care in the US. Government decides how much they pay, and consistently pays less far less than any private source of payment (insurance, self-pay, etc.) And as it has turned out, Medicare pays around 1/3 of what private insurers pay. Medicaid pays less -- maybe around 25% in many cases (with no copays for the most part). As a result, while general price levels are going up a little, Medicare and Medicaid are going up less. But doctors and nurses, and hospitals and medicine and all of that continues to go up. The result? Medicare stays low, the shortfall vs. CPI is "cost-shifted" to private insurance. Private insurance might have gone up at roughly the pace of the CPI increase. Maybe more, maybe less, but roughly the same. But because it must absorb the increases for twice its share of the health care economy, prices charged insurance companies go up twice as fast, driving up health care costs. There are other factors -- great technology, FDA bureaucracy, the growth in the number of administrative personnel to deal with these insanely complex programs -- all adds to cost. But NOTHING adds cost like the cost-shift from Medicare and Medicaid. The only fix is to privatize public health care which ultimately would bring overall costs down. This is not a difficult concept to understand.