The obstructionist party, GOP, being flushed out? Healthcare

[swchandler]

"Just because Sam chooses to have kids while employed in an at-risk job doesn't give him any right to have the government take money at gunpoint from other people to pay Sam's living expenses. The minute Sam takes on dependents, insurance should be his highest priority expense behind adequate food and shelter. A TV set or a clunker is not his neighbor's obligation, and we already have all sorts of programs in place to provide health care, education, food, etc. IF WE WANT NICE STUFF, FROM KIDS TO LEVI BRAND JEANS (my jeans cost me $3.50), IT'S UP TO US TO WORK HARD ENOUGH TO BUY IT. Clinton proved that given that option, people kicked off welfare got off their asses and got jobs.

You deal with exceptional cases individually rather than through blanket programs encouraging a hundred million slackers. How do you feel about giving food stamps to families earning $51,000 ... about twice my pension? Subsidizing health care insurance for families earning $82,000 with millions in savings?"


Why does this wingnut continue to offer us such worthless nonsense? Without a doubt though, it uncovers much about his underlying hates and prejudices, even if it comes from an imaginary world he digs out of nowhere. Damn, the guy hates 1/3 of all Americans.

[mac]

Isobars complains so much about food stamps that I decided to peruse the last Bush budget to see what we are spending money on and how they are trending. Engineers who do their homework always look at trends. You can readily do your own research at http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy09/browse.html

Starting with the big picture, the Federal government paid out $3.107 trillion and took in $2.7 trillion (remember those tax cuts that let you buy more hamburgers?). But relatively little of the outgo is discretionary—a little under $1 trillion is discussed as discretionary. Where does that go? Mostly to security and the military--$594.5 billion for security, another $70 billion for the wars, $44.8 billion for Veterans, and $38 billion for Homeland Security. That’s about $750 billion, or more than 75% of the discretionary funding. I don’t know if the war number is low-balled, that’s just the number reported on the GPO web site. Of interest in terms of the long term implications of the Bush era, the Veterans budget has doubled since 2001, and we can expect 30 years of payouts for injured vets. If you look at economic growth during the Bush administration and where it went, you can readily see that for the latter part of his presidency, security absorbed virtually all revenue increases, going from $594 billion to $730 billion between 2007 and 2009.

Well, what about the rest of the money? Entitlement programs—social security, medicare, and Medicaid total $1.27 trillion. Interest on the debt for FY 2009 was $280 billion, but is rising at about 12%/year. Medicaid is also going up more rapidly than is sustainable, something that should not be a surprise to anyone except those that think it is not a government program and that they already paid for it. (tea anyone?)

How about non-security? If you’re really interested visit the site and poke around; information drives democracy. But I’ll give you a few of the bigger programs in discretionary funding. After Defense at $515 billion comes Health and Human Services at $70 billion, Education at $59 billion, and food stamps at about $56 billion. If we drill a little deeper on that last number, and use http://www.fns.usda.gov/fsp/faqs.htm#25, we can see that for 2008 25.7 million people were eligible, at a cost of $28.6 billion (a little over $1000/person/year—could you eat with that?) and it went up substantially with the economic downturn. It requires about 1.8% of the Federal budget to keep people from starving. I’m comfortable with that, and I’d be willing to pay Isobars 1.8% as well to shut him up. (My father used to say that there are people who know the cost of everything but the value of nothing. He was also conservative and lived in the Tri-cities, but he was not a mean man.)

So how does that compare to some other programs that we like? Well, we spend $2.4 billion for the National Park system—and remember that states like Arizona and California are so broke they are closing their parks. That’s 0.08%--can I double it and get a little management of my parks? Or do the teabaggers want to close Yosemite too? Unemployment represents $2.6 billion—and are Republicans in favor of extending those benefits during a prolonged recession? Oh, at 0.1% that would be way too expensive and would push us over our debt ceiling.

Is there a more rational way to do some of this? One of the best ideas I’ve heard, and fiscally conservative, is to look at our military budget as a cost of securing our access to oil. Of course the global warming deniers think that our life style is a god-given right—they find that somewhere in the bible. So if our consumption of gasoline is 378 million gallons/day in 2009 (http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=oil_home), or 140,000,000,000 gallons per year, and we paid for half of our military budget with that would be about $1.78/gallon. But alternative fuel supplies are a bad idea, aren’t they?

[mrgybe]

[swchandler]

"Anything else you'd like to learn from the "newby"?"

I have to say that classifying mrgybe as a "newby" here wouldn't have reflected my view. That was a bit off the mark I think.

But, I have to say mrgybe, you've added a different spin on things, and I think a lot worth thinking about.

[DanWeiss]

[mrgybe]

Mac, You make some cogent points in your post ref Kaiser..........and I am truly sorry to hear about your daughter's medical issues. I hope that she is fully recovered.

[mac]

Fully recovered, from either a severe accident or cancer, is a relative term. But my daughter has 4 children whom I will see today, so we are blessed and thanks for asking. I thought my points about the Federal budget, and the illusory nature of instant fixes were even better. Most of the new teabaggers don't know much about government, they're just against it. And their leadership is the same old Republicans that were implicated in creating this fix. We've used off-budget trusts, in both State and Federal governments, to create longevity in the programs we like--and to insulate them from future legislatures. It has created a huge problem.

Insurance is an interesting arena in which to debate individual responsibility. Catastrophe, whether accident or flood or illness, is largely a random event that societies have organized themselves collectively to deal with-for thousands of years. And for that time there have been unscrupulous businesses that would take the money and not have the capacity to pay--look at claims after Katrina. So it is by its nature, a collectivist (should I say semi-socialist) aspect of human organization. And here we are ranting about socialism.

Your point about competition is absolutely true--in an absolutely transparent and well financed market. In medical care it is complicated by the large amounts of capital involved on both insurance and medical care side, and the current battle between those two units in avoiding payouts and maximizng profits. My point was that I am very happy with my non-profit Kaiser that does both. I haven't seen competition fix the problems in health care, and heavy cartelization persists in the insurance industry dealing with health care.

[mrgybe]

There was a decent New York Times article about health insurance competition last year:

http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/how-much-competition-among-insurers/

Many will argue that a government sponsored option will provide increased competition.........I don't disagree, it would......but at what cost to the taxpayer? I just believe that allowing established health insurers to provide needed competition, with appropriate regulation, is a much better solution. Currently, each state has different mandates which result in a myriad of different health insurance products across the country, regulated by 50 different state bureaucracies. Can this be efficient? Seems to me, that people's health issues are pretty much the same country wide. Enabling multiple insurers to offer standard health insurance products across the country (with enhancements one can choose to purchase), would, in my view, result in a much more efficient market. Appropriate antitrust oversight would ensure that industry consolidation does not undermine competition.

Incidentally, we should not confuse "nonprofits" with "not making a profit". Kaiser, for example, makes very large profits, and it's top executives are compensated as handsomely any private insurer. Also we should not ignore the rising cost of medical care which is a significant factor in rising insurance costs.

[mac]

Which of these reforms did the Republicans or current Tea Party folks implement when they were the majority party?

[mrgybe]