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Originally Posted by MalcolmSmith
No. This is not brought to you by the Democrat party. Basically, what we have here is a medical bubble--similar to the .com bubble and the housing bubble. The entire world of American health care is inflated, overpriced, etc. And there is a giant ball of credit out there supporting: new facilities; unnecessary equipment, technologies and research; massive salaries and profits; high-cost, ineffective or even dangerous pharmaceuticals, etc. That big medical credit bubble is about to burst--meaning we don't have the money to support the inflated costs of the medical industry as a whole. But, right now, it's still alive and the people who profit from it are loath to see the party end. So, they are using their leverage with government to keep it afloat by socializing the costs (through insurance or government--it makes no difference) in the same way we socialized the costs of the housing/financial crisis. It's a game of musical chairs. The only problem is all the health care people and bankers, etc. get to sit down first.
American businesses have been, are, and will continue to dump any employee they can from health care (the only real preventers of that now are nostalgic social values, which are rapidly evaporating). It has nothing in particular to do with either party. It has to do with the fact that the U.S. runs on a bubble-to-bubble economy. If there is one guy to hang the blame on for the bubble-to-bubble mindset, it's probably Ronald Reagan. He took the governor, guilt or social conscience, off of our economy. But, it's probably not fair to him alone--the American people elected him, because we liked that message. There's plenty of blame to go around. The question shouldn't be: Who is to blame?; but rather, What do we do now? We have trillions of dollars of bubbles up there that have to come down. How do we do that without killing each other?
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Other than the part about Regan, I actually agree with a lot of what Malcolm has said here. There is a huge medical bubble because the consumer has been removed from direct cost factor of the equation. By creating a medical industry based on co-pays for the direct consumer, while constructing a system of favors and tax-breaks based on employer provided care, and coupled with an insurance industry that has lobbied hard for and won several measures that act to protect them from competition ... we have been effectively buying our medical care on a credit card for decades.
While I'm sure Malcolm and I will wind up at opposite ends when it comes to the solution, there is a bubble and it is a huge problem.